Magma in the Océan

{{B:Magma In The Océan}} is an exhibition showing works by Réunoinese artist Brandon Gercara. The show is taking place during the annual photography festival Rencontres d'Arles, in France.
Curator Éline Gourgues writes:

At the origin of all terrestrial life, the encounter of molten magma and water forged the first habitable territories. Recalling the appearance of the hyaloclastites - the fragments of vitreous material born from the sudden cooling of this encounter—Brandon Gercara’s work crystallizes sustainable spaces of existence for marginalized communities.
In Playback de la pensée Kwir, the artist engages with the Piton de la Fournaise, the telluric symbol of La Réunion. The artist performs a symbolic transmutation with this emblematic site, steeped in colonial history: the volcano becomes the stage for a political affirmation of Kwir* identities.
In this deserted landscape, the drag presence reinvents these identities through the playback interpretation of a fictional narrative written for the first March of Visibilities in La Réunion, in 2021. Here, art becomes a force for balance in the face of social turmoil, like the water that once stabilized the primordial magma.
The series Conversations and Lip sync de la pensée extend this hydro-magmatic process, the artist creating extraterrestrial portraits outside our socially standardized planet. They transmute the testimonies of oppressed bodies into spectral presences through the necessarily political practice of drag. These works sediment a living archive of intersectional struggles, revealing ongoing social mutations.
This geological reading reveals how Brandon Gercara mobilizes art as a telluric force to reshape the social landscape of La Réunion: their creations are necessary eruptions that shake the layers of domination—gender, race, class—that have been transferred from colonialism. By merging activism and creation, they create a territory where intersectionality becomes a source of creative potency.
Like the magma that forges new territories, Brandon Gercara’s work transforms colonial traumas into emancipatory artistic material. In the violence of dominant systems, the artist finds the strength necessary to subvert them, inscribing in every gesture a perennial space of resistance.
*Kwir, of which Brandon Gercara is the creator, is a militant creolization of the English term “queer” reappropriated by Reunion’s LGBTQIA+ community. This linguistic adaptation embodies a double resistance: it maintains the subversive dimension of “queer” while anchoring it in the Creole reality of the island, marking a desire to emancipate from both gendered norms and colonial legacies.

The Rencontres d'Arles Maison des peintres 43 Bd Emile Combes, 13200 Arles France Website