The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me was shown at the School of Image Arts as part of Maximum Exposure 29: Beyond the Surface.
The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me is currently showing in the Gallery TPW TD Vitrine.
The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me is currently showing in the Gallery TPW TD Vitrine.
The Soil and the Daylight Recognize Me is a series of cyanotypes depicting queer and trans subjects, printed on bisque-fired clay tiles. Born out of an interest in alternative image printing processes, this project proposes a visual representation of queerness and transness that uses the elements of nature to produce its image. Inspired by the cyanotype process’s history as a method for botanical photography, the series challenges the belief that queerness and transness is a consequence of socialization—a belief commonly held amongst older generations within immigrant families—rather than something that predates history and is as natural as the sun and the earth.
Splicing and separation are techniques Sai Bagni commonly uses in their exploration of queer and trans visual representation. Jose Esteban Muñoz describes queerness as something that is always yet to be touched and seen, and this series articulates that through the motif of bodies that are cropped off or cropped in, articulating queerness and transness as something that is always shifting and moving, never fully realized into a fixed state. Inspired by Indigenous perspectives of gender as plural and fluid, the series asks, “What can this body become, and how many ways can it exist at once?”