My layers

When I start my creative process there are always those recurrent thoughts about whether or not what I’m about to make is meaningful enough to spend so much energy in. What if what I’m about to do or say is irrelevant? Why do I even bother trying? Will my ideas create an impact meaningful enough? Will it resonate to others? Will it resonate to me?

What’s the most important thing for me?

-To be heard. 
Not only by others, but by myself as well. I need to remind myself of what I’ve accomplished throughout the years and what I still need to do. 
I need to remind myself of what I’ve become, of who I want to be.
And who I am, now.

Who am I?

-An artist.

I twist the reality we live in by photographing people. But I don’t photograph them to make ”pretty looking” pictures. I photograph people so I can hear echoes of who they are. Because by framing them they allow me to enter parts of their universe, parts of their vulnerabilities, parts of what they fear or love… 
To this male contemporary dancer dressed up with his white pants and with his opened vest showing his muscled chest. This male contemporary dancer that does a graceful solo in the dark. As the light was so subtle I could only distinguished glimpses of his glowing dark skin…
I captured his every move and every step with my eyes first, then use my hands…
To just… 
Clic, and clic, and clic. 
To the young woman with her entire body covered in milk with nothing else to show but her pale broken soul…

For an hour I stood quietly next to her, letting her pour her heart out through the lens of my camera.

To the man lying in the rain with his eyes half closed whispering to the empty sky ”And all I’ve loved, I’ve loved alone” before the rain washed away his last words…

I tried hard to stay calm as I wanted to reply so badly to him: ”you are not the only one that feels this way, you know?”

You are not the only one

Yeah…
Photography can be raw emotions, sometimes. 
To me, it can be both tragic and beautiful. Soft, and powerful.

Who does my art serve?

– I hope that somehow, in some way, I’m helping some people with what I do. That I’m helping them feel connected with who they are. That the photographs I do for them give them hope…

I know it gives me some. 
Because without it, I wouldn’t have been able to canalize all my sadness, all my madness all my pain and all my love…

And I wouldn’t have been able to win this unexpected war…

It wasn’t a war with bombs and blood, or with screams and bodies, but it was still violent. From the outside everything seemed calm, but in the inside everything was shattered into pieces. The only two adversaries fighting this war were me against my mind. 

Psychosis

Noun: A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

For a period of pure nightmare, 
I lost connexion with the world.

And when it happened, my mind took over and made me face my inner demons so brutally and so fast… It made me see and hear things that were so frightening…
I wasn’t prepared for that. How could I have been? 
How does one can ever be prepared to face mysterious distorted silhouettes that are tracking you down during the day and haunting you in your dreams at night?
Dark silhouettes that seem so monstrous and real. 
How does one can ever be prepared to hear obscure voices no one else can hear?
Voices that judge you, scream at you, laugh at you, blame you, threatened you.

And the craziest thing is that no one could hear or see my fear; 
I kept it away from everybody the best way I could. 
People that were close to me during that period of time could only see it through my eyes and my weak voice, telling them:

”I’m afraid I’m losing contact with the world.
 »What if I never get to be myself again?”

Photography

Noun: the art, process or job of taking photographs or filming something.

To me, photography sits perfectly between fiction and reality.

How do I react when I’m hurt? 
I create from my pain. 
Creating helps me face the ugliness of my thoughts and transform them into beautiful things… into meaningful subjects. 
To me this is the best cure for a broken mind…

It’s like that proverb that says: Find what you love and let it kill you.
Well, I’ve found what I love and “I want to live of it until the very end.”
It took me years to feel better again

It was only after that time that I felt fully comfortable with this other important part of my identity: Being a gay black woman.
How does that define me?

The first step was to accept who I was entirely… in front of my family.
Even though it was hard, considering the fact that some members on my mother’s side weren’t accepting of my attraction to women.

During that time my head had a shave side, and on the other side, I had a huge afro.

That was me.
That was my statement. I felt free. I felt comfortable. And beautiful.
But they couldn’t understand it either. 
I had to hide that other part of myself as well. 

During the holidays I was supposed to go visit my family in Guadeloupe to say hi to my grandmother, my aunt and my uncle. It has been so long since I last saw them.
If I had gone to visit them, my family and I would have exchanged some banalities about my school, my family, my friends, my love life…

My love life.

If only it was that simple.

Explaining my sexual orientation to them would be…complex. 
Sometimes, being raised in a family with religious values can be challenging. 
Especially if you have to keep secrets.

When I arrived in Guadeloupe, there was a moment when my family and I were all sitting around the dinner table and I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I had to be a liar for three entire weeks. I had to shut down my identity in front of them. 
I couldn’t take it. So while everyone was eating, I shouted:

I am gay and I’ve been taking drugs, do you still love me!?

Everyone went quiet. They were all staring at me. 
I felt so small and vulnerable.

All of a sudden my grandmother stood up, put her hand on my shoulder and said ”You are my granddaughter, of course I still love you”
My heart was so heavy.
I couldn’t hold my tears of relief, because of all of the love that was coming from my family – the love that I had thought would have been taken away from me.

So the vase exploded and I couldn’t put the pieces back together. That was the last conscious conversation I had with my family during the holidays. My psychosis took over control of my mind. 
If you know what a bad trip feels like, imagine it ten times worse, during an entire week. Nonstop.

It was just too much to handle all at once.
I felt trapped.

It was hell.

I had to come back home to Montreal in urgency.

Artists with a tortured mind…

The concept of it seems cool, but in reality, it’s not pleasant at all. 
I was fighting against myself to the point where every action I wanted to take seemed like an unreachable mountain. I was afraid to eat because I thought it might be poisoned. I couldn’t even gather the courage to take a shower because I was afraid it would wash away what I was trying to hide all my life: my true self.

When I start my creative process I am full of doubts. But for some reason, I do it anyway. Because it heals me. It’s a part of me. It makes me feel whole.
For a brief moment, it makes me feel invincible because I know I am about to share something real with others.

But I also feel vulnerable because I can sometimes surprise myself in the revelation of something so true, I don’t know if I will ever have the guts to share it with others… But I do it anyway, because if it doesn’t come out, then I crash from the inside.

Sharing my art is the easiest way for me to speak, whether it’s with words or not.
This is my trick to put the pieces back together.
Now I’m at a better place in my life.

So, who am I? 
Just another human being… with lots of layers.