For the latest project The Impossibility of Looking Outside (2020-ongoing), Pablo Lerma spent several months, discontinuously, in isolation and lockdown with his three kids and husband. He documented the family’s interactions, and reflected through images and text on ideas of care through a queer masculine perspective of parenthood: “I’ve been investigating the ideas of private and public, the possible and impossible in moments when the outside felt threatening and the inside was safe. I set up routines to combine my parental tasks and my personal/artistic tasks in order to allow and create an interior space of care. These routines generated different groups of materials that can tackle into different emotional and physical levels. From instant images of the sky, every time I stepped out of the house, to lists of edibles we consumed every day, or BW photographs of emotional outbursts of any member of the family, among other materials.”
From going outwards with archival research and larger historical context to going inwards observing intimate routines of the family of his own… Pablo Lerma throughout his practice asks questions: how and by whom have gay men been represented so far? Why do certain patterns reoccur? Is it possible to break through the heteronormative gaze? He contributes to the very much needed shift of the representation of queerness and queer family.
