Penchantly gay is part of a practice-led PhD research inquiring into the ways long term endurance of cisheteronormativity manifests itself on the body. At its core, my work deals with the intangibilities of embodied and lived experiences of oppressive gendered structures, and how these are situated in relation to hierarchised knowledge systems deriving from white, cisgender, heteronormative and patriarchic frameworks.

Penchantly gay is series of images tied to a visual mapping that was used to aid my memory when trying to understand how old I was when gender normatives began being projected onto my body. This particular poster project pays tribute to childhood queerness*, to not yielding to heteronormative ruling despite all the difficulties attached to resisting and refusing supremacist impositions. When transforming penchant into a adverb its meaning goes beyond a ‘strong inclination’ into the reclaiming of my own identity as it was: ‘insistently’ [penchantly] gay.

Rotterdam poster location, September 25th - October 1st, 2023

Artist talk, CultureHub, Rotterdam, 27 September 2023 (Photo by Lili Huston-Herterich)

Penchantly gay! Public project documentation, 2023 (Photo by Mariana Aboim)

Penchantly gay! Public project documentation, 2023 (Photo by Lili Huston-Herterich)

Penchantly gay! Public project documentation, 2023 (Photo by Mariana Aboim)

Penchantly gay! Public project documentation, 2023 (Photo by Mariana Aboim)

Penchantly gay! Public project documentation, 2023 (Photo by Mariana Aboim)