existential boner (2022-2024)

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existential boner is a personal work about obsessions related to the body, identity and sexuality. It is has been published as a book by SPBH and ECAL in July 2023, and is also an installation.

I am and have always been a trans person, I decided to identify as non-binary and started my gender-affirming hormone therapy in November 2020. I closely and compulsively monitored the changes I was undergoing, as a way of reappropriation of my own self. Doing so, photography was for me the best way to record all of these steps, following the never ending rhythm of my obsessive thoughts. Through a compilation of images and texts, including collages, vernacular photography, studio shoots, snapshots, and scans, my body of work evolved in parallel with my own body, developing in a direction that emphasized the urgent feelings crawling through my mind, ultimately telling a singular story that brings representation to many—representation that was lacking in my childhood.

Inspired by photographers and artists such as Helena Almeida, Francesca Woodman, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and many others, I drew from these influences the creativity looking to explore the limits of photography.

This is a selection of images that are in the book.

#NoWhereToGo is a project I’m passionate about because it aligns with my past work. I used to be a porn performer and filmmaker and co-founded with friends a collective called Oil Productions in 2018. However, sharing sex-positive content online has become increasingly difficult due to censorship on social networks. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter (X), and TikTok have ramped up their content moderation, particularly since Instagram's shadow ban policy became more tough since 2019. This has made it harder for sex workers—especially women* and non-cis-males—to share their work.

While these platforms claim to promote "safe" content, they still allow far-right groups and radical feminists (TERFS) to thrive. Posting certain images feels like a form of resistance against these oppressive systems. With the account @xesx.esxes, I try to bypass algorithms by altering content so it’s only explicit to the human eye. Still, it has very few followers and is already shadow banned, only findable by typing the exact name.

Unapologetically Sorry is a video-performance about identity, self-doubts and desires. I trained AI models with archives pictures and more intimate images to add animated and organic layers to the video.

Clouds 2024 is an applied project developed in the frame of the Master in Photography at ECAL. It represents my vision of the future for 2040. A vision that takes place elsewhere, in a different space-time, where the laws of physics that we have known until now would no longer apply. 

New materials is discovered, materials that renew themselves and react according to the dimension in which they are found. 

no tears, just dreams is a work I did during my first semester at ECAL. I was inspired by the sentence "Make kin not babies" from Donna J. Haraway to produce this work.

The series is composed of roughly two hundreds images, using all the same combination of techniques. A snapshot of random everyday life moments that is printed, the writing of a laconic sentence from my journals on the picture and the scanning of the image completed with the writing to come back to the digital. 

My visual approach varies from colors, shapes or memories linked to the pictures. What is important for me is to work in layers.

NTJD is about finding survival mechanisms, I want to explore the struggles we encounter on a daily basis from different social and cultural point of views, originating with specific groups of society, the queer minority for this work in particular. Being queer today is often perceived as something cool and trendy by the people living comfortably in the heteronormative western world. But it’s nonetheless something that is still seen as a deviance by some, and hate is spreading more than ever around the world. As a queer-trans person, I have encountered some parts of the struggle that comes with the fact that I embrace my queerness and live it in the open. I’m lucky to have a family of friends with which I’m feeling good with and that helps me navigate a system that doesn’t allow me the same rights as cis-straight people. 

This book is a personal exploration of identity, an ongoing process of self-confrontation with the many versions of myself, both past and present. It does not follow a traditional narrative, instead unfolding in fragments, reflecting the fluidity of human identity. The work questions the social construction of gender and its performativity, drawing from my lifelong experience of playing with and challenging gender roles.

Structured like a diary, this project embodies over a decade of journal writing, with the book serving as a safe space for self-exploration. Through layers of eclectic, tentacular thinking, inspired by Donna Haraway's concept of string-figures, it allows for constant re-contextualization, offering multiple perspectives and interpretations.

The collage technique reflects the physical and conceptual complexity of the human experience—fluid, contradictory, and ever-evolving. It embodies the idea that we are hybrids, shaped by constant transformation.

As expressed in The Separatist Manifesto, this work also addresses the ways we re-code and resist oppressive structures, reclaiming our desires and identities in defiance of the systems that constrain us.