ADMA 2024-2025

Above the Curve

How do we tell the stories of bodies that are not shown? How do we archive what overflows, what is deemed ‘too much’: too fat, too visible, too different, too present?

Above the Curve is a research project that explores living archives and embodied narratives centred on fat, local and diasporic bodies from the territories of French Guiana and the French West Indies. It is about making visible how bodies like mine – fat, mixed-race, diasporic – become sites of archives, holding stories of memory, resistance, transmission, erasure and the possibility of reinvention. It is a way to weave together personal memory and collective history, reclaiming my Guyanese-Martinican heritage while acknowledging the silences, gaps and erasures shaped within my métis identity. By confronting these absences, I seek to carve out space for marginalised bodies within dominant narratives, and to reimagine what it means to inherit, embody and transmit culture.

In a world that casts fat bodies as undesirable, fatphobia seeps into both public and private spheres, subjecting fat people to constant judgment and violence towards their bodies and identities. There is an urgent need to create new narratives around fatness, especially in places like French Guiana and Martinique, often left out of global conversations on body representation and where inherited colonial norms continue to shape and contaminate the way we view and regulate bodies.

Above the Curve sits at the intersection of artistic practices, fat studies and feminist, decolonial, queer and crip theories, questioning the relationships between body, gender, race, class, memory and coloniality. My working methodology is hybrid, embodied and situated. I use photography, video, auto-ethnography, family archives, performance and collective gestures to produce sensitive forms of knowledge. I am interested in what bodies carry, transmit, or conceal – how they speak where words fall short, where official histories fail to include us.

There is a lot of silence in my family, culture and traditions not passed down, lost recipes, forgotten names. Being in Guiana felt like something long-buried slowly revealing itself within me. For once, my body did not feel excessive. It was just there, among others like it. I recovered memories I had never lived. I walked on lands I only knew through broken family stories. I saw my grandmother’s gestures echoed in her sister’s hands. I recognized faces in strangers. I filled in the gaps, not with certainties, but with sensations.

This research aspires to unfold over a long arc of time, across multiple territories, memories and intimate geographies. It does not aim for a single or fixed form, but instead embraces a fluid, evolving process – one that welcomes a plurality of voices, narratives and experiences. I imagine hybrid formats, exhibitions, workshops, publications, gatherings, as ways of sharing, transmitting, and activating the embodied knowledge held in our bodies. The project is meant to open into a collective space, where others can bring their fragments, gestures and silences. What I seek, above all, is to make our lives visible, to forge representations that are tender, powerful and just. To create spaces where our bodies are no longer pushed to the margins, but become vibrant centres of stories that are both political and deeply human. This is the heart of my research – in the weaving of intimate memory and collective history. I want to create narratives where fat bodies are not pathologized but celebrated. Where flesh becomes both language and archive. Where the body is at once document, territory and refuge.

This work begins with me, but it doesn’t belong to me.

It speaks of my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, my friends, some strangers I met. It speaks of the bodies I love, the bodies we live in. It speaks of a place where our bodies matter, where we are part of (hi)story.

It speaks of a we.