existential boner is a book and an installation, and it is mainly about obsessions. Obsessions around my body, my appearance, my sexuality, my desires, everything that connects to the flesh mostly.
I started my gender-affirming hormone therapy almost two years ago now, and I’ve been closely monitorin

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g the changes that I’m undergoing on a daily basis. While working on this project, I realized that this monitoring has always been present in me, I just couldn’t identify it at the time. From drawing on my body as a child, to eating disorders with heavy workouts as a teenager and body modifications with tattoos and piercings as soon as I turned 18, I understood that there was something « off » with the way I was living in my flesh vessel. I never felt like I belonged anywhere and couldn’t understand why it seemed so easy for others to just live. When I realized that I was in the wrong body, I could retrace everything that happened in my life and suddenly it all made sense, I was trans. I’ve always been trans, there was just nothing in my life before that allowed me to understand that.
With this project, I hope to give some kind of representation of transgender people to a larger audience, inside and outside of the queer community. I want to celebrate trans lives, honest lives that found a way to live peacefully outside the norms of our system and its binary structures. Everyday I’m grateful to live the life I have right now, being trans is the greatest gift I’ve ever had, and I’m starting to grasp how to live inside of my body.
Finally, this work is a kind of catharsis for me. A way to finally feel aligned with all my past selves and the self I am now. A way to give back something to my community that gave me so much and also, as I said, I hope this can bring some representation to queer people, for those who are questioning their gender and need answers, or just a testimony of our existence.

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