Bodybuilders

BODYBUILDERS stems from the desire of Italian photographer Alien to document the new alternative drag and club kids scene across the world. A dynamic community, constantly evolving and often difficult to grasp, whose traces are collected in a first volume dedicated to the United Kingdom, followed by a second publication on the Americas, from South to North, currently in production.

It's a delicate work of encounter and observation on a niche practice within the queer community, which takes shape in reality as a performative and somewhat ritual moment, a daily expression of the self or a shared alter ego only in digital form. Masks, prosthetics, makeup, and postures that distort the body challenge the perception of the body to open up the gaze to a fantastic human panorama which carries the visionary force of re-existences often in struggle for their recognition.

As Helen Hester, Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London and author of the Xenofeminist manifesto, writes in the introduction to the first BODYBUILDERS volume: Each person photographed has to some extent built themselves, channeling not only personal aesthetics, cultural reference points, and intellectual ideas but also unconscious forces – the unknowable within us that necessarily finds expression in all our words, actions, thoughts, and behaviors.