PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECTS

At the beginning of 2023, I am hosted at the “Waka Waka Dance Academy” by its director Jeannine Fischer-Siewe. At the annual dance school festival where I shoot my first images, teachers perform soca, n’dombolo, krump, hip-hop and twerk. The program begins with a conference about gender-based violence in dance world and there’s a mooncup station… I know I’ve come to the right place. Jeannine and her team are very articulate on feminist agendas, and we have long discussions in her office about women entrepreneurs, intersectionality and the work of inspiring figures such as Rébecca Chaillon, Soupless or Tashinda.

At Jeannine’s, twerking is practiced in the dark with no gender mixing. I navigate between the piled shoes in a warm, humid atmosphere to the sound of Twerkness’s class and the encouragement of Tashinda: EVERY BOOTY CAN TWERK! I don’t know it yet, but I’m photographing the woman who will produce Aya Nakamura’s choreography for the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

I’ll soon be connecting these first images with the ones I later photographed at the International Twerk Championship. During the event, I focus my attention on self-staging, on the presence of social networks and on the work of appearances that emerges in the details of fabrics, gestures, and hairstyles… Here everyone has swapped their comfortable sweats for sequined shorties, braided hair, and accessories that shimmer under black light. I discover a queer world and a competition organized in categories, thematically defined and for which male and female competitors have made their own costumes. Reminiscent of cosplay and voguing…

From these two types of images emerges a series of 6 photographic objects made from metal and Plexiglass.