existential boner is a personal work about obsessions related to the body, identity and sexuality. It was published as a book by SPBH and ECAL in July 2023, and is also an installation.‍

Mahalia taje Giotto is and has always been a trans person; they chose to identify as non-binary and started their gender-affirming hormone therapy in November 2020. They closely and compulsively monitored the changes they were undergoing, as a way of reappropriation of their own self. Doing so, photography was for taje the best way to record all of these steps, following the never ending rhythm of their obsessive thoughts. Through a compilation of images and texts, including collages, graffiti,vernacular photography, studio shoots, snapshots, and scans, taje’s body of work evolved in parallel with their own body, developing in a direction that emphasized the urgent feelings crawling through their mind, ultimately telling a singular story that brings representation to many—representation thatwas lacking in their childhood.‍

Inspired by photographers and artists such as Helena Almeida, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Molinier, Cindy Sherman and many others, taje drew from these influences their creativity looking to explore the limits of photography.

This ongoing experimental project brings together a collection of images taken from scans of flowers and other organic objects gleaned from the artist’s wanderings. Each element is selected for its fragility, its state of transition between the ephemeral and the perennial, like a vestige of nature in mutation.

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Thanks to the method used - transparency, inversion of colours and transformation of textures - these fragments of reality become something else. The flower undergoes a metamorphosis, losing its original status to give birth to a new entity, a hybrid creature that is both foreign and familiar. Suspended between life and death, it seems frozen in a state of latency, like a spectral memory imprinted on the surface of the image.

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In this way, the project is constructed like an imaginary archive, a kind of mutant herbarium, in which each specimen reinvents the laws of the living. These floral creatures, emerging from an undefined world, interact with each other and question our relationship with nature, with the transformation and persistence of forms. They exist in a floating temporality, halfway between disappearance and resurgence, between memory and oblivion.

THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN is a dream woven at the crossroads of worlds, absurd poetry, a dreamlike journey through the chimerical limbo of the subconscious. This visual narrative, both phantasmagorical and formal, juxtaposes dark and disturbing imagery, reflecting the artist’s obsession with this other world. It oscillates between lucidity and hallucination, between light and darkness, like an inner wandering where landmarks gradually dissolve.

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This project blends text and images, revealing singular micro-universes, fragments of a shattered narrative that begs to be recomposed. It's a poetic-narrative association, in which the viewer, as visual narrator, can reappropriate the story as they see fit, infusing it with their own interpretation. The images, dense and intense, unfold like the ceaseless movement of waves, revealing mental landscapes that oscillate between the gentleness of memory and the brutality of forgetting. They draw their melancholic force from a kind of darkness or lost paradise, evoking those spaces where reality tips into unreality.

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The work is largely based on analogue images, scans and instant photographs (Polaroids), each capturing a fleeting essence, an ephemeral sensation. With no rigid methodology, the project is built up organically over time, letting the images emerge and come together according to their symbolic force. Putting them together with short poems creates a silent dialogue, a game of visual tarot cards, where each image becomes a card opening a door to an unknown elsewhere. These chance or intentional associations contribute to a fragmentary narrative, an intimate cartography of the invisible.

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Through this project, the artist attempts to explore what lies hidden in the interstices between the visible and the dicible, what resists any rational explanation. THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN is an invitation to plunge into a sensory universe, to listen to the silences between words and to get lost in the shadows before dawn breaks.

NON-SENSE PROJECT is a multi-faceted project, an exploration of the quest for meaning. A meaning that the artist tries to capture through these snapshots, like looking at a childhood photo, trying to revive the buried memories of a bygone era.

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It's probably not insignificant that this project was born in 2019, and developed in the midst of the COVID crisis. At a time when uncertainty was omnipresent and her own identity was being called into question, she was navigating a professional environment that was as precarious as it was uncertain. In this context, this work became a means of taming this instability. The simplicity and unpredictability of the medium allows her to step back, stop, reflect and redirect her approach. She does not always have the opportunity to do this in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

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NON-SENSE PROJECT is also a never-ending series. If the artists decides never to end it, this project could be with her for the rest of her life, until she dies. This idea gives her a kind of comfort. Having to deal with psychiatric disorders, she sometimes does not recognise herself or get lost in the complexity of her many facets.

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NON-SENSE PROJECT is both a deeply intimate visual narrative and a mirror of a troubled and complex era, an era in which it is sometimes difficult to find oneself.