Kama La Mackerel

To Be Held by the Femme Island / To Be Known by the Trans Body brings together multiple bodies of work from Kama La Mackerel’s interdisciplinary practice over the past decade. Textile installations, photography, sound, and ritual video unfold across the FOFA Gallery’s York Vitrines as a poetic meditation on gender, lineage, memory, and the possibilities of repair from colonial rupture. 

At its heart, the exhibition explores the layered relationship between the trans body and what La Mackerel names the “island body”—a geographical and spiritual figure central to their work. Here, the island is not a colonial fantasy of emptiness and exploitation, but a living body shaped by ecology, history, and ancestral, mineral, and geological memory. Within this framework, the femme island emerges not only as a metaphor but as a material presence—a space of softness, refusal, kinship, and reclamation.

The installation Trans Affirmations, composed of hand-painted silk saris once worn by La Mackerel’s mother, forms the pulse of the exhibition. These textiles trace a lineage of intergenerational transmission and healing, situating the deeply personal act of reconciliation with the mother within a broader collective demand for trans visibility, protection, and love. The silk, painted with acrylic, becomes both surface and invocation, embodying a trans poetics of femme inheritance.

Photographic self-portraits accompany the installation, where La Mackerel brings the trans body into contemplative relation with the landscapes of their home island, Mauritius. Developed through slow encounters, each image offers a meditative engagement with land, gesture, and presence. These photographs challenge the colonial aesthetics of the tropical postcard and propose new ways of mapping the self in relation to place. The body, adorned, exposed, submerged, becomes an island: sovereign, vulnerable, and radically present. Rooted in ritual and ancestral spirituality, La Mackerel’s process activates personal, intergenerational, and ecological memory. The resulting photographs become portals of queer and trans becoming, resistance, and return. 

Projected on a bed of salt, a single-channel video installation speaks through ritual gesture and poetic movement, while a trilingual soundscape—English, French, and Kreol—fills the space with ancestral breath and vibrational resonance. These sonic and material layers invite the viewer into an immersive ecosystem of remembrance.

Throughout the exhibition, text appears not only in visual form, but also as an atmosphere—archipelagos of poems float in the air and linger in salt. Each work holds a fragment of a larger cosmology, in which transness is not explained but affirmed; not isolated, but interwoven into the fabrics of memory, land, and desire.

Curated in response to the architecture of the vitrines, To Be Held by the Femme Island / To Be Known by the Trans Body invites slowness, attention, and care. It is a space where gender, geography, grief, and becoming coalesce— where silk remembers touch, salt carries history, and trans bodies find belonging, not at the edges, but at the centre of their own maps.