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Archive of Otherness



The Tale of Unraveling  Blue Jeans 


Chapter 1 :

DENIM BOUND / LIÉ.E.S PAR LE JEANS

Shorter index (2025) Photographie,16 x 20 pouces  

                 
STATEMENT

Denim Bound / Lié·e·s par le jean is a photography series exploring lesbian masculinities and transmasculinities.
The project is part of an ongoing research on the construction of the lesbian gaze, an affective, political, and embodied look, and the ways queer bodies reinvent the semiotic around their own gender and representation through this singular textile. Here, denim becomes a living and symbolic material. It evokes both butch and trans working-class heritage and North American popular cultures.

Out of its fibers I also see blue jean as a diasporic fabric and as a political garment with, not only deeps ties to several Black communities but also various, ever evolving, forms of queer expressions. From traditional lépi of Guinea to the Black lesbian activist Stormé DeLarverie of New York city, wearing her pistol at the hip of her blue jeans pants with a matching jacket, collar turned up and sleeves rolled (Unsuitable, 2024), the indigenous roots of west African materials travelling through time and space, ended up coming to shape queer codes.

Ragged (2025) Photographie, 16 x 20 pouces


        
    Leï (2025) Photographie, 16 x 20 pouces    

   


    
Jasper (2025) Photographie, 16 x 20 pouces


Texture (2025) Photographie, 16 x 20 pouces

Han (2025) Photographie, 16 x 20 pouces

Chapter 2 :

Blue Jeans, Red Bricks

Mbind 1 is a prototype installation built from red brick and the alternation between Falé fluvial cotton, spun and woven. Created in collaboration with workshop head, artist and weaver Joa Diop, the installation, whose title translates from Serer as “concession,” in the sense of habitat, explores materiality as a site of rooting, initiation, and memory.
The project is part of a research-creation process grounded in the deepening of a reflection on denim and the lesbian gaze. Through a methodological approach referred to as the unweaving of this textile,I seek to explore the material manifestations of queer history and their symbolic charges within the transatlantic space.
Seeking to foreground the mystical dimension within the political, the installation returns to the mythical brick thrown by Marsha P. Johnson at Stonewall, a cathartic moment in the LGBTQ+ struggle on Turtle Island. The cryptic dimension of its architecture, which alternates points of tension and fragile balance, engages the notion of queer-coding within a Senegalese anti-queer context. Planted facing the cashew tree, its red pillars symbolically embody the shores of the Atlantic, between traditional Senegalese red brick and a queer political emblem drawn from New York architecture.

Mbind 1 (2026)
Installation of Red bricks and rain-fed cotton Falé exhibited as threads and weaving

In collaboration with Joa Diop