CURATOR: YANDÉ DIOUF

The Faire Famille exhibit draws its inspiration from Kiddy Smile’s journey, a path of emancipation that celebrates the freedom of choosing where to be at home. A key figure in voguing and ballroom culture, Kiddy Smile is a child of its parties, which are refuges for the LGBTQIA+ community, where everybody can be themselves and honor multiple identities without fear of violence. At events that are political as much as artistic, Houses—families chosen by performers or created out of necessity—compete in dance battles and runway shows. Headed up by “mothers” who guide and support their “children,” these Houses combine collective solidarity and individual expression.

The exhibition does not revisit the history of ballroom culture but invokes the rallying power of the Houses, which lend collective power to the individual allowing them to step out of the shadows to which they were assigned in order to question what makes a family. How do personal trajectories converge to create a collective?

The works on display in Faire Famille give voice to the stories of those habitually characterized as living on the margins or the outskirts, in areas that are regularly invisiblized, ignored or feared, since they are liable to subvert received ideas and privileges. Yet these stories are essential: they constitute a fundamental part of the world. Without them, without those margins, it would be fatally fragmented and incomplete.

The exhibiting artists explore and reveal ancient or undiscovered, and sometimes forgotten, connections that bond individuals to spaces, stories and history. They shake up conventions to redraw the maps of identities and relationships, encouraging a reinvention of our individualities in a shared framework.

So, Brandon Gercara uses fiction to break the silence about queer (“kwir”) history from a Creole perspective on Reunion Island, and to imagine stories of emancipation. Angelica Mesiti explores performance and music as engines of collective living, whileRoméo Mivekannin, through his self-representations in Western iconography, subverts imposed imaginings of Black bodies.

Together, these works redefine bodies, matter, stories and sonorities to open up new perspectives for notions of community and belonging at the intersection of multiple heritages.

The exhibition is a House, a space of shared meditation on the place we occupy and our trajectories, in order to devise collective strategies capable of turning oppression and denial into creative and living forces to faire famille together.

Yandé Diouf

Featuring Malala Andrialavidrazana, Raphaël Barontini, Binta Diaw, Alice Diop, Penda Diouf et Verena Paravel, Brandon Gercara, Laura Henno, Mariana Kostandini, Angelica Mesiti, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Roméo Mivekannin