STUDIO BLUE BARBOSA

“onai, sinárra, ioidar” means “alone, quite, strange” in Damiá.
Three words that describe how I used to feel growing up, the disconnection with my homeland and its normativity, which almost felt to me like speaking a different tongue.
The Queer Tongue “Damiá”, was created by the queer collective OnceWeWereIslands and as a long term artistic collaborator, I was invited to participate as a visual artist in their project HomeComing – Greatest Hits!
The challenge was about translating the concept of Damiá into still and moving images, about how I could imagine a visual work that represents a language created by and for queer people and what it would mean for me.

I knew from the beginning that blue would be the main character of my concept. This color has developed in the last years as almost an element of identity, a visual input that supports me emotionally and motivates a lots of my creative work and interactions.

Using five meters of klein blue fabric, I interpret Damiá as a safe space, a comfortable bubble that can be built around oneself and can be brought always with. This fabric represent the idea of a language that helps you merge and disappear in a context/society that is not fitting with your identity.

I traveled back to my origins, to the roots where my identity was built, questioned and denied, specially by my young self and I reconnected with the space I grew up in: my granny’s house. An old big house with big patios and plants, in a small village in the middle of Spain, close to nowhere.

A space now empty of human life after my granny’s passing due to Covid, but full of nostalgia, energy and blue objects that fit perfectly my blue cosmos and help me understand, review myself and my identity.

These work is about the interaction of this fabric, and the safe space it represents, with both my past and present, combining both contexts and linking them conceptually; drawing a line between this old dry village, my granny’s porcelains, her cleaning tools, and the green and moist bushes of Hasenheide’s cruising area in Berlin.

Check the full film here.