Period
2015
Proposed by
RAW Material Company
Location
Paris
About the project
In 2015, I began working with Mother Lasseindra Ninja, who introduced ‘Voguing’ in France. Voguing was born in the years 1960-1970 in the black LGBTQIA community of New York. It consists of ‘Houses’ (House of Ninja, House of Ebony, etc.) each directed by a ‘Mother’. The Vogueurs meet at ‘Balls’ where they compete in the form of battle/fashion show.
In 2016 I presented a video installation in Paris activated by Mother Lasseindra. That same year I also invited the curator and researcher Eva Barois De Caevel to do some research work about the Ballroom scene.
In the years to come I would like to develop a series of new works including the following:
- Ball / Anti Ball crisis of the (in)visibilty: the organisation of a Ball in the white cube. A first space, that of the Ball, will be accessible only to Vogueurs, a second space of the same dimensions as the first will be open to the public of the museum. There, a sound installation (20 speakers) will spatialise the sound thanks to 20 sound sensors in the ball space. The community of Voguing is an invisible community in France, firstly because Voguers are black and also because they are LGBTQIAP, which often results in the breaking of family ties. It is this invisibility that I would like to highlight.
- Borders’ Outfits: a workshop led by jean-François Boclé and the Guadeloupean designer Vincent Frédéric Colombo about clothing/architecture to question the boundaries Vogueurs put in crisis: masculine/feminine, mainstream/sub- culture, Paris intra muros and extra muros, etc.
I would also support the creation of a location for the Paris Ballroom Association for the purchase of equipment (computer, camera, sewing machine); a place to make links, to help Vogueurs in their social integration, or to conduct HIV-AIDS prevention campaigns.
External links
About the artist
Jean-François Boclé was born in 1971 Martinique. He was trained at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. He develops a practice which questions the bipolarity of the postcolonial globalised world, oscillating between violence, toxicity, racialisation or gentrification and the possibility of We. He has recently exhibited in the ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur), Para Site (Hong Kong), Saatchi Gallery (London) and Queens Museum (NYC). He has participated in eleven international biennials.
