Chameleon
Ugo Woatzi
Having grown up in a patriarchal and traditional village in the south of France, I had to follow certain codes and rules in order to become “a man”. I couldn’t embrace my identity freely…hiding and performing myself most of the time. Closeted, alone and living a secret life for many years, I was scared to be judged by my sexuality.
Chameleon is a photographic series about hiding and revealing. This duality becomes a metaphor of the little lizard that hides itself in plain sight. It is a narrative exploring masculinities and spaces beside the heteronormative structure. The still frame evokes the love, hope and fear of people who exist outside these constructs that can be suffocating. I create my images through evocations of the personal and collective experiences of my community. By using masks, fabrics, accessories and composing with colours, shapes, shadows ; I question the performative / camouflage aspects of our lives. My images are staged to create visual metaphors and specific statements which form part of global visual and political activism. I am equally engaged in celebrating as well as illustrating the diversity of masculinities.
This camouflage ability is an expression of how I seek to open up dialogue about those of us who live but do not fit the conventional moulds constructed by heteronormativity. The series is confronting our societies in a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack in many different places in the world. My work aims to encourage queer people to show themselves and be proud of who they are.
Ugo Woatzi was born in France, in 1991. Nominated for Futures by FOMU, he lives and works in Brussels and in Johannesburg.
Ugo Woatzi’s photographs reference real and imagined spaces caught between the worlds of freedom and constraint. He reveals and yet conceals, as a chameleon changes colour to blend in and survive. Ugo’s collaborative process is a reflection of the desires and struggles of his community. Together they create a more sensitive and accepting world, one that both escapes from and confronts the harsh realities of divisive heteronormative structures. The images, tender yet defiant, transmute feelings of love and of conflict, a relatable and universal sense of longing. His sensuous, quietly intimate gaze taps into subtler aspects of human desire — and yet these seemingly accessible emotions are simultaneously blocked in an act of obfuscation. His concealment of faces and identities evokes the fear, censorship and stifling experienced by queer communities across the globe.
Ugo invites us to consider and celebrate a range of masculinities, performative bodies, psyches, and experiences, as he explores the idea of “visibility” as one fraught with both fear and excitement. This duality is embodied powerfully in Ugo’s work, which is both a performance and a lived reality, the speaking of truths and the creating of fictions. That is the nature of photography: to create new worlds from fragments of previous ones. It is in this new world, in the sensitivity of Ugo’s gaze, that we finally access a space of acceptance.
- Text by Michelle Harris (.TIFF)