These images are taken from a project focusing on São Paulo’s LGBTQIA+ (and especially transgender) community, which is very active in Latin America’s largest city.

Started in 2019, at the beginning of Jair Bolsonaro’s mandate, this project pursued with the pandemic, and it continues today in a new political context. The photographer highlights the resistance and vitality of this community, despite the violence and rejection from part of society. He follows the daily lives of its members, between artistic performances and visibility events, and more intimate moments captured in everyday life.

Over time, this approach has been coupled with a collaboration with Vicenta Perrotta, founder of the “Transmoras” workshop, a place of welcome and a counseling center for transgender homeless people of the outskirts of São Paulo. The artist and trans activist is photographed in places such as the National Congress (in Brasília), a bank, a land that belongs to commercial groups and on the street.

The purpose is to confront normalized and transphobic places in Brazilian public space with transgender corporeality, to show how it can eventually heal their toxicity. This is also the thrust of the film Vincent is making with trans singer Deusa Nagô, shot on a Petrobras oil exploitation. The project questions the origins of transphobia and the means of combating it. The aim is to raise awareness, enabling the formulation of radical alternatives for the future.

The resulting work constantly moves back and forth between the intimate body and the social body, echoing the ambivalence of Brazilian society, torn between the violence of exclusion and the profound desire for change.

From this point of view, the “My body is political” series should be seen in the context of the long-running “Île Brésil” project, just completed: a ten-year immersion in the anonymous margins of Brazil’s major cities, where Vincent lives and works, exploring the ancient atavisms that run through the country.