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This work will be available for viewing until March 31st, 2021. password: use2021.  

Download catalogue essay by Renata Critton-Papp

So you understand me, my friend

So you understand me, my friend (2019) is a photo and video series that recounts the experience of living as a queer person in Egypt. The current military regime deploys policies based on the British colonial government's laws at the turn of the 20th century to prosecute, imprison, and torture any kind of dissident sexual or gender identity. Queer identities are, therefore, confined to the private space. This generates constant tension and paranoid behaviours in the queer community in its constant transition between public and private spaces.

In the series, spaces of intimacy and portrait of queer subjects are contrasted with hostile exteriors. The series seeks to generate a first-person portrait of the life of gay men in Cairo, avoiding fetishization as well as dramatization. Sexual and gendered violence are directly confronted every day as an Egyptian queer: it is the only way of survival. In the images, subjects from my community, mostly gay and trans men, appear to be comfortable in domestic spaces. It is precisely this normalization of sexual repression and violence that states how extremely potent and unavoidable it is: if you survived one day, you could survive every day. Systemic violence against queer subjects seems to be invisible and a testimonial: once it is suffered, it is silenced. If we can speak, we can pass.

About the Artist

Pedro J. Barbáchano (Madrid, 1996) is an MFA candidate at Concordia University. His practice is based on the photographic documentary tradition and engages with colonialism, archaeology, identity and social issues in Egypt. He is the youngest artist to have exhibited at the biannual photography festival SCAN (Tarragona, Spain). He is a recipient of the Gabor Szilasi Prize in Photography and the Roloff Beny Fellowship (2020). Currently, he researches as a fellow of the Post Image Cluster at Milieux. His current research deals with oppressed identities and youth in Cairo. His projects have materialized as photo series, exhibitions, books and augmented reality installations