We were never meant to survive

This series is about the violence of America's colonial history and the racism imprinted in it, as well as its persistence today.

“We have all heard the bit about what a pity it was that Plymouth Rock didn't land on the Pilgrims instead of the other way around. I have never found this remark very funny. It seems wistful and vindictive to me, containing, furthermore, a very bitter truth. The inertness of that rock meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans and who have never been able to resolve their relationship either to the continent they fled or to the continent they conquered.”

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal, 1964

This series is about the violence of America's colonial history and the racism imprinted in it, as well as its persistence today. The relevance of this work resonates particularly deeply with the current events in the US.

To demonstrate the still prevalent underlying violence of colonization in the United States, I have chosen to re-activate the typological categorization of signaletic portraits, which typically reduced the Other as either a guilty party or stigmatized object of knowledge. However, I have altered this framework to destroy it from the inside out and show the power of resistance and resilience at play. Despite the drive to subjugate them, the people portrayed escape us: we cannot quite understand them, define them, nor pin them down. The Other is resisting us, not through the use of force but rather by revealing their vulnerability with the utter nakedness and integrity of their gaze.