This project is a work in progress. You can read it while listening to this.
Lecce might be a small, vibrant south Italian city mostly known for its baroque architecture and limestone marvels. But the thing is, besides these classic features, it is a city which is seeing a vanguard of queer people and drag queens asserting their identities in an otherwise traditional, heteronormative social environment.
This project, in its gradual future releases, is aimed at exploring Lecce's drag community with my own eyes and curiosity, and to represent its protagonists it in their performative and non-performative moments.
This is Southern Drag Diaries.
Billie Kill (IG @billie.kill), Alister Victoria (@alister.victoria) and Andromeda Unchained (@andromeda.unchained) are the main protagonists, make-up artists, speakers, performers and friends who will take me by the hand and let me explore their identities.
My humble wish is to be able to give back both to them and to a larger public the images they helped me take, trying to avoid any unflattering voyeurism or naivete in their visual narratives. These are Billie, Andromeda and Victoria for you, and for me.
Aleister Victoria at a drag event at ZEI cultural space, in Lecce's historical centre
Billie Kill
Andromeda
This collaboration with Lecce's drag community started when Billie and I found each other within the Castello di Corigliano d'Otranto's walls after ages we didn't meet. I was pretty new to the drag topic - and someway still am - but they were glad to get me up-to-date with the latest developments of the local scene.
What stuck with me that night was another thing though: their personal vision on how they would like to see the local drag community evolve, and their effort towards it.
Italy is a demographically old, Catholic-oriented country where the Roman Church always influenced (and still does) opinions and policies. All the above is especially true within its peripheries, in its Southern provinces, so much so that a substantial chunk of Queer people leave their towns of origins for more welcoming social environments in the big cities of the North, namely Milan.
But the atmosphere in Lecce seems to disprove this paradigma.
A Queer Market Show event held in Lecce at ZEI
In this scenario, Billie's, Victoria's and Andromeda's choice to stay and to promote their queerness speaks volumes. It is in this way that they kickstarted a cultural initiative known as the Queer Market Show (@_qms_), which aims to bring their drag performances and gender identities talks around the cities and towns of the Salento peninsula.
This land, my homeland, is full of contradictions. Its traditional, heavily heteronormative past seems to be coming at odds with fresher, more progressive tacks on gender identities which are as foreign-originated as they are becoming ever more locally-articulated.
Maybe naively, this Southern Drag inspired me to visually explore my city - and my own photo archives - with a newly developed eye. An eye careful about what may appear as conceptual contradictions; an eye which looks to juxtapose these very asymmetries, to truly explore them, and to find that deep bond which holds them together.
Southern Drag had me diving into an whirling semiotic exchange: that between inherently Human Architectures and beautifully Sculpted Poses that keep permeating and fading into each other in my own imagination.
Looking at my friends' performances became ever more a punch into the old/new dichotomy we so much rely on. Their poses, a centuries-old cry dressed in gender-fluid robes.
In this light, the fragility of our limestone shapes meets the refinement of Southern Drag movements. The assertive posture of Southern baroque blurs with the nobleness of my friends' poses.
