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Events News Spotlight
Queer! Like Fearlessness to Imagine
sokari ekine
Jun 5, 2019

Celebrating PRIDE

“Not queer like gay. Queer like, escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like…and pursue it.” -Brandon Wint

The photos presented here are from a series of short photo essays on the transformation of silence into action whether through speech, words, images or performance. The photographed are those who speak truth to power, and for whom being Black/POC Queer Intersectional Feminists is a way of life and a way of surviving. I drew inspiration for this series from an article by Kui Kihoro Mackay and by these first photos of Blessol Gathoni, a Queer Kenyan radical social justice activst living in South Africa.

In conversation with Gathoni they spoke about seeing, not just perspectives, scopes and lens but seeing in real depth. Here I see and Gathoni sees, that I see.  

"As Africans, In as much as we are separated, killed, taken We will remain This land- with its heart, pulse, and arteries, rivers, landscapes and seas of stories that entail lifetimes informed by generations of our people- will remain. I have come to realize there are no “specific/ absolute” routes to connecting with your ancestry, just a willingness to take a walk, share and be with them. Acknowledge their struggle. And the many ways we are entangled in these struggles. Give or offer a continuity to them. In whatever ways you (we) can." To Sokari: Remain well, loved and free" - Gathoni J Blessol.


The  photos were taken in Brasília during the Marcha Das Mulheres Negras, the week of 18th November, 2015.


Sokari Ekine

Sokari Ekine is a Queer Nigerian British Feminist, diasporic nomad, visual scholar, and activist, writer, educator seeking out new possibilities and ways of being beyond the normative and hegemony of whiteness, heterosexuality and native informers.
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