(Tsy) Possible

An exploration of love, belonging, and cultural tensions in Madagascar through intimate, tender portraits, capturing how affection and connection emerge amid freedom and constraint, while reflecting on tradition, social norms, and familial bonds.

(Tsy) Possible is a project born in 2024, during my residency at Fondation H in Antananarivo. In it, I explore affective, friendly, familial, sisterly and romantic dynamics through an approach grounded in exchange, dialogue and even negotiation with the people I photograph.

The work draws on staged scenes that blend family photography, novelistic storytelling, and the familiar universe of sitcoms.

Situated in the Malagasy context, these relationships open onto a broader reflection on the underrepresentation of Indian Ocean identities.

The title, (Tsy) Possible, can be translated literally as impossible, since tsy marks negation in Malagasy. By placing this negation in parentheses, I suggest another reading: what if the impossible, the prohibitions and the obstacles were not endings but beginnings? They might be points of departure, escape routes, realities to be invented, without erasing doubt.

The word possible, borrowed from French and widely used in Madagascar, has no direct equivalent in Malagasy. This linguistic gap reveals the nuances that shape perceptions and imaginaries.

The series reflects not only the tensions of love, but also those of a Malagasy youth often torn between the desire for freedom and the attachment to traditions, between external influences and family or social expectations. A fragile balance is constantly negotiated between rootedness and refusal, between pride in one’s culture and longing for elsewhere, between loyalty and fracture: the unresolved choices of the Great Island.

Finally, the project unfolds in a sensitive relationship with the landscape, understood in its spiritual dimension. Nature is not a simple backdrop but a living and sacred presence. To contemplate it, to love it and to preserve it is part of a continuity, an ecology of bonds that includes love of self, love of others, love of communities and love of all living beings.