Redefining gender identity and exploring the possibilities that exist beyond the binary. Apartamento nurtures the coming of age story by Igor Pjörrt

Being a teenager in Madeira, I was frustrated and had desires that were tied to the insularity of the place I was living in. I was constantly aware about the distinctions of what I considered the external distant world to be. I became confronted with the mundaneness of this middle class apartment where, especially late at night, I’d stay up and search the rooms for potential compositions that could be evocative or even accusative of this teenage melancholy and boredom I felt, while at the same time attempting to elevate constructed domestic scenes using my own body. As time passed, patterns started to appear throughout these images, where the modern architecture of the apartment and its aseptic decoration, in its simplicity and monotony, became a signifier for this apparent privilege of being dissatisfied with being home and safe.

The images in this project titled Apartamento, meaning both ‘apartment’ and ‘separation’ in Portuguese, stemmed from a different urge than that of my teens, questions of transformation as opposed to insularity started to appear. The exhibition is grasping the complexity of the multitude that makes up the ‘self’ while still retaining the dignity of inhabiting and nursing a singular body. It’s a balance between the body as shelter and as a cluster of past selves that can risk collapsing onto themselves only to reveal a renewed self. Eventually, these dreams became a pulsating friction between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ only to finally turn this apartment into somewhat of a gestation vessel, a womb, slowly preparing a renewed self, a new vision for the outside world.