What does community mean to you?

I’m coming into this both as a private person and as an artist – community has shaped a lot of my life, and my work as an artist has been shaped by finding my community, which happened at Village. I saw the worth of it. I saw why we are bound to be together, more so than we should be plagued with individualism. I think we must declare our interdependence more than our independence. Society today has a lot of features that make us hyper-independent, but we’re forgetting that when things go wrong, we need each other. So community means a lot to me.

How do you find your community?

At this point, my community finds me as much as I find it. I was introduced to Village through a friend who told me there were gay people coming together to do workshops, basically about connection and figuring out who we are as people, as a community. I came for the first time in 2019 for my first Stretch. Through that experience I found that I believe in community far more than I believe in dogma. Something human-driven works so much better for me than anything driven by a book or a belief system. Since then, coming to Stretch and Village, I’ve become known as someone who is always open for a chat, always open for connection. I work in textiles and fashion, so people come to me, not only to talk about clothes but also, I feel, to gain self-confidence. I get complimented, which gives me the chance to reflect that back and say what’s great about others. As long as we see the light in one another, community will stick.

How do you celebrate yourself and your community?

I block out a lot of time in my schedule to do nothing, to dream, to ruminate. As a child I always dreamed of living a life of dreaming and then making things, and that’s essentially what I do. I also have a practice of making clothes for myself, which is a way of celebrating who I am – ideas and dreams that I get to make physical. I do that for others too, on commission: embroidery, garments. So it’s something celebratory of myself and of others, and of community.

What do you think makes this project unique?

As far as I know, this is the only place in Europe – maybe on the planet – where queer and LGBTQIA+ people are challenged to figure out who we are in relation to one another.

Can you share a moment at we are village that felt meaningful or stayed with you?

I live for the group photo moment. When everyone lines up and gathers together, and then you get this beautiful souvenir at the end of the festival. I’m usually quite wacky in those pictures – I really make it my moment. But what I love is that when the photo comes out, you see that everyone else felt exactly the same energy. It’s so heightened. That’s a moment I always come back to. If I were sick and could only make it to one thing at Stretch, I would still come for the picture.