Made of Smokeless Fire

Habibitch in their bedroom in Paris. “[Our anger], is only a response to the violence that we have suffered or are undergoing and for me, it is important to redo the chronology of anger and violence, because we often forget that they are just reactions. They are not ex nihilo, they are not attacks, they are angry defenses.”

Lalla Rami lays down in the garden in front of her apartment in Boulogne, wearing a traditional fez and a belly scarf. “It is through the eyes of others that you can tell that I am a trans, Moroccan and Muslim woman, or whatever the fuck you see. But from me to myself, I’m just a badass girl named Lalla Rami.”

Djalil stands in his living room, looking at the neighbouring buildings in Lyon. “It’s like a knot in your stomach, as if you were burning from the inside, as if you felt your heart blazing, and then you say to yourself -- what is going on?” 

Bouchta wears a scarf on her face and looks at the mirror in her appartment in Marseille. “It’s like an old story that keeps coming back over and over again. I am very melancholic, but it’s my life. Like a lot of gay people’s lives, it’s not an easy life. We are always looking for a little quiet corner for self-preservation. We meditate, we exist in our corner and this photograph is a separate universe that we all have within ourselves : a closet, a trunk, a drawer. It’s very mystical. It’s like a past, present and future, it is eternal.”