Galaxies
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Dates2012 - 2018
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Author
- Topics Portrait, Social Issues, Contemporary Issues
- Locations Jakarta, Jakarta
This ongoing project consists of images obtained by an overlapping process of a portrait of an Indonesian transgender woman, taken by me, and the photo of a galaxy taken by Hubble Telescope.
GALAXIES
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Charles Darwin
"Every atom of your body has been fabricated in the heart of a star that no longer exists, or in the dreadful explosion with which its existence has ended and has spread its ashes into the galaxy. When we look at the starry sky, actually, we are also looking at the place where we come from.”
Amedeo Balbi
This ongoing project consists of images obtained by an overlapping process of two photographs: one taken by me and the other taken by Hubble Telescope. No color correction has been made, neither on the original images nor on the final image: I work using only the natural and/or artificial lights that are available in the places where I take the portrait. Title and caption of each photograph, as well, are made up of two parts: a description of the galaxy and a part about the subject portrayed.
I have been documenting the daily life of waria community in Jakarta for 5 years, so far. Waria is a term that, in Indonesian, derives from the merging of two words, wanita (woman) and pria (man), and stands for people who are physically born male but who feel that they have a female soul. 7 million of transgender people is estimated to live in Indonesia. But, in recent years, their community has been under increasing pressure amid rising conservatism. The situation has escalated since last year, when high-ranking government officials supported calls for a ban on LGBT activities on University campuses, television and radio programs, arguing that the LGBT community are immoral and dangerous and thus the ban is needed to protect the younger generation, particularly children. Once considered wise people and the ones who can speak with the Gods, because of their duality man-woman, now waria occupy the lowest level of Indonesian society and are stigmatized and bullied.
I have explored with my camera the colourful and cramped 3x2 sqm rooms for rent where the waria live and keep their belongings. Their bodies, their faces, and their gestures constantly question my identity, as the Hubble Telescope scraps portions of an unknown universe, in search of answers to the questions that mankind has always been asking: who are we? Where are we from?
The ethereal beauty of the galaxies expands the boundaries of the tiny spaces and the crumbling buildings waria live in, creating new worlds of flesh and bright stars, hidden thoughts and fluctuating iridescent gases. A mute correspondence of forms and meanings, only seemingly opposed, is established: when we’ll realize that we are just a part of all that is in the Universe, then severance will cease to exist, because everything in the Universe is the same within us all.
This project is my clear artistic statement of resistance and opposition to any kind of discrimination and oppression against LGBT people, especially my transgender friends in Indonesia.