Article by Elliot Hoste on DAZED | Photos by Felipe Orellana | Interviews by Tony Evan

“It was only a couple of months ago that the photographer Felipe Orellana moved to Lisbon and met “Vallechi”, a musician who already lived in the city. Connected through a mutual friend, the pair instantly formed a friendship based on an appreciation of one another’s artistic practices. That very same day that they met, “Vallechi” played Orellana his techno track “Emotional Patches”, a song that the musician says “symbolises the strength and resilience we draw from within, even when everything around us is constantly changing". From here, they decided to collaborate on a photo project inspired by the song, capturing creatives from the Lisbon scene and reflecting on experiences of trauma that they’ve boldly overcome.

When I spoke to Orellana about the photo series, he was extremely mindful that they approached the topic with care. Each person that he captured shared a story of past trauma, with quotes like “kids used to beat me, and I don’t know why” dotted in a simple, white typeface across the final images – however, Orellana was careful not to push his subjects past their comfort zones. “As the photographer, I wanted to capture their vulnerability while being respectful and mindful of their boundaries”, he says of the process, adding, “I wanted them to feel at ease and share as much as they wanted to.” It’s a method that undoubtedly paid off – whether it’s a defiant stare into the camera or a calm look of serenity, each subject exhibits a composure that suggests the experience had been truly palliative.

In order to further emphasise the resilience and strength these traumatic experiences can produce, Orellana decided to photograph each subject alongside a sword. Whether brandished in the air, held at their feet, or set down beside them, the photographer allowed each person to decide how they would display the weapon. “The swords serve to represent the personal struggles that each individual carries”, he explained, “and how they navigate them in their own unique ways.”

Although primarily symbols of strength, both Orellana and “Vallechi” were keen to emphasise the dual nature of the weapons as well. “In our planning discussions, we explored the concept of carrying a weapon that can be potentially harmful.” The photographer elaborated, “But also serves as a tool to overcome our darkest moments.” In this way, the swords are displayed as both threatening and empowering, a visual manifestation of the effects of trauma on our everyday lives.

Another way in which Orellana set out to depict the resilience of the human spirit was through the surroundings in which each individual subject was photographed. The initial plan was to capture each person in their own home amongst their personal belongings, but the concept was soon adapted when some subjects expressed discomfort at the intimate setting. After searching for a backup location, Orellana remembered the Palacio do Grilo on the southeast coast of the city. Despite what the name may suggest, the palace provided a run-down aesthetic that he felt worked perfectly for the theme of the shoot. “While the palace still offered some extravagant and ornate areas, I deliberately selected the ones of raw beauty and genuine authenticity,” says the photographer of the chipped plaster and grassy knolls he set the shoots in. For Orellana, the locations “represented a contrast between the external appearances and the inner strength of the individuals. It was about highlighting the resilience that can emerge from challenging circumstances”.

While Orellana’s pictures attempt to “normalise the presence of trauma as a natural part of life”, the photographer understands that there can be room for misinterpretation with this particular series. He explains, “One potential misunderstanding could be that the series portrays trauma as sexy.” While the photographer does acknowledge that “there are elements of flirtation and sensuality in my photographs”, he holds that these choices “automatically create an intimate space, establishing a sense of closeness and understanding”. It’s this sense of shared understanding between subject and audience that emerges as the purpose of Orellana’s work: in sharing such vivid portraits of conquered trauma, Orellana allows us to ultimately face our ow.

23rd May 2023”

Elliot Hoste

Go along page to see the beautiful photographs taken by Felipe Orellana and dive into the powerful and courageous conversations between the creatives and Tony Evan.

INTERVIEWS

BELLA

BELLA : One of the most traumatizing moments of my life was when I had a motorbike accident. I was with my boyfriend at the time and in that moment, I remember I asked him to slow down and instead of doing so, he sped up. The traffic had stopped, and I was projected from the bike slamming the left side of my body on a car, opening my knee on another car, and ending up with my legs under another one. Went to hospital with a broken nose, dislocated hip, and a cerebral hemorrhage. They even though I was going to die. (...) I never lost my senses. I was awake for everything that happened. My then boyfriend passed out, didn’t have a scratch on his body and didn’t remember what had happened. (...) This contracts between us, because of the accident, helped me in a way, have an awake call to the toxic relationship I was in. I started to look at everything with a different perspective. After the accident I spent a whole month and a half at my parents’ house in bed. I knew I was already different in a way, I felt stronger than I was before the whole thing although I had the help of my parents for the basic routines like for showering and things like that. I overcome that traumatic moment all by myself, mentally of course.

TONY: During the time you spent alone, out of the dynamic of your relationship, was there an interest within yourself to look or do something about it?

B: I already wanted to break up with him. However, it was always back and forth. Eventually after New Year’s Eve, a friend had to help me because he had locked me inside the house. I was left with physical scars that aren’t going away. I hated my body because every time I looked at them, it was reminded of the moment and of him too. But with time, I accepted them, and they don’t react the way I used to. Throughout our whole relationship I believed every negative thing he said about me. I was blind. I was living inside a toxic bubble and being manipulated by him. But after we broke up, eventually I started to think he was wrong. I saw everything that was beautiful about me, things that before that we didn’t truly believe. I felt so free too!

T: The acceptation moment, how did that happen? Where did it come from?

B: I also did autotherapy. I started to analyze myself, my behaviors, and the situation. I’m my own therapist we could say. But it wasn’t easy thought. We had been together for six years and during that I thought I had borderline disorder and I had suicidal thoughts and behaviors. But after the breakup, my depression started to dissipate. I started to make new friends and live my own life. In 2021, I had to be hospitalized because I had mania episode. The depression came back for a while, but it didn’t last. Since then, I’ve been good. Never went to a psychologist but I’m followed by a psychiatrist since I’m bipolar. But for me, it helps to relativize everything that happens to me, and I always try to focus on the positive side of things. Nowadays, I’m happy and true to myself. We must live life one day at a time and love yourselves. And we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help if we need it. Reaching out is important too!

LEANDRO

LEANDRO: My school period was the worst in my life. Kids used to beat me, and I didn’t know why. I was different for sure, and it was so painful. After that, in the process of growing up, a lot of things happened. I started early as a model in São Paulo, and some people there, who are now responsible for creating big modeling careers, were very negligent at the time. I was in a model agency already for a long time - since I was fifteen until I was nineteen - they reunited with me and told me I would no longer being represented by them. I felt indignant and I suffered at first, because theyfelt like family at the time. That’s why I think it affected me more than it could because I had some sort of relationship with them. But then, very quickly, I used that as another step, and I used that as fuel to keep on with my journey. And I never felt that I had to prove them wrong because it’s normal and it’s a guaranteed to hear a “No” a lot of the times when you start dueling in this kind of career. Specially in Brazil, most of them are very young, don’t have a way to support themselves financially and are in a very vulnerable state. I saw a lot of people going back home and giving up on pursuing their dream. But I felt compelled to keep on going because I knew I had value, and I knew where I wanted to go. I’m a spiritual person, and for me words have power, so when something it’s verbalized, things start to materialize so things can happen.

TONY: But even after all of that, it seems you never lost your sense of self value. It was always like that?

L: It changed a lot of times. Sometimes I would get so far away from what I thought it was my purpose and, in another times, I would be so close. I always believed in my story even in the worst moments, and when you are starting to live your life is not always easy to keep this mentality. And that is ok. It’s alright to get lost when you are still looking for yourself. I think it’s part of the process. In many moments of my life, I found myself sad, upset or really depressed. But I survived that, not only for myself but for other people too, to be an example. I knew I had to be stronger to keep my way and to really change myself and my life. I believe there’s these ropes that push you back to your right way. That’s why I believe in myself, it doesn’t matter who said no to me, doesn’t matter that no one believes in me, I will do my best and then I’ll make a new story. I felt very welcomed when I arrived in Portugal and got a chance to work for a lot of big clients here, so in a way it showed me that after a lot of bad things, there’s a bright way ahead, and moments that told me I was in the right track.

JUAN

JUAN: I came out when I was fourteen, and I come from a little town in Chile, two hours from Santiago, so everybody there were more conservative than they are now. This was eleven years ago; I was the first gay man out in my school. I suffered a lot of bullying because of that, especially when we had sports. Those were the most vulnerable times, when we had those classes to a point that I even was the most afraid to go and have them. I always tried to make an excuse to skip them. I even got sick and had my colon checked because of all the stress I was under. For a while I started to hate sports and working out due to the association I did to those moments. I was felt too skinny and too weak because of the bullying I suffered in school.

TONY: When did you feel you started to overcome that?

J: I started to heal when I confronted sports again and started to go to the gym. I faced those issues with coming out and the whole process when I was exercising. I didn’t feel weak anymore, I consider myself a strong person now. After a while I even became friends with those who bullied me before. I forgave them and I’m now glad that I was the first gay to come out. From what I hear from my brother who still goes to the same school, things are changing a lot. He has a lot of kids in his class that identified as bisexual, lesbian, or pansexual even.

T: You’ve become friends with your bullies. When did that happen? How did the idea of forgiveness come to your mind?

J: When I realized that things were changing in my hometown and the vision people had about gay people wasn’t ultimately their fault but mainly of the environment and the conservative society they were in at the time. They didn’t mean to hurt me intentionally. They didn’t know better then. I confronted the thing that hurt me the most when I was young. I gave it a try again and understood that the sports and exercise itself weren’t to blame. I decided to go against the thought that I was weak. I started to feel stronger, not only physically but also mentally. In a way it’s my therapy. I work out every day. It helps me cope. Since I’m a freelancer, it’s a way to keep a routine and a structure during my day as well since it’s the only thing I repeat every single day. I really wanted to change my mind set about working out. The bullying couldn’t take away the joy from exercise and sports that I had since I was a child. I was ultimately the love I had for it that made me want to give it another chance.

RÉDA

RÉDA: The fundamental trauma in my life would be my father figure. My family is from Algeria until they moved to France when I was born. He didn’t know how to raise me. I don’t think he was a bad or a mean person, I do believe he loved me, but he never taught me how to express my emotions, deal with them or react to certain situations. He didn’t help my mom. He had a very intense and heavy presence in my entire childhood which made me hate myself and hate him at the same time because he would only tell me I wouldn’t be good enough or being able to reach the standard he had for me as a man. Being a trans woman, I never felt I would be able to be who I truly was so it created a lot of conflict with him that could be extreme violent sometimes. We just didn’t understand each other. He also was unconscious of what he was doing, or what it takes to take care of a family that he was doing dangerous things that we didn’t know about. One day, my mom, my sister and I got attack in our own house with guns pointing at us. That night was the night we realized that it was too much, it went too far, since my mother already wanted to get a divorce. I had to live with that till I was nineteen until I left and moved to Berlin.

TONY: And when you moved to Berlin, what started to change?

R: I created a new family in the queer community there. It gave me perspective, but it still was a process. In the beginning I was still young, so I was still a victim of my emotions and behaviors. I was not sleeping a lot and spent most of my time dancing and going out. But I was blooming. It was the first time I felt part of a community and I felt safe. I learned on how to express my emotions, listen to my intuition and to observe. It wasn’t until I came back to Paris for a job that I found a true shock when I discovered this new relationship my family was creating with my dad. They started to get along although with distance but rebuilt a relationship of respect, since we wouldn’t ever hurt them again. But I always cried when he would come to visit because I wouldn’t understand why they didn’t feel the same I did. My sister called me and asked me if I was going to her wedding asking me if I could put aside my issues with my father only for that day. When I saw my dad in that day, I realized that the ability to forgive and dissociate whatever situation or figure that has been hurting you has nothing to do with you.

T: Being able to forgive was the major step to start to heal?

R: We often blame our parents for everything we are, but this is the transgenerational type of disease that we carry on through generations and if we never break the cycle, we’ll never become something else. You will always carry that luggage with you. Even though I’m extremely hurt, and I have rage - which I don’t express in violence, but I express in addiction or overworking and work out – but when I think about my dad, I don’t feel hate. I’m working on it now. You should take things step by step. By forgiving him, I’ve freed myself from his power over me and created the ability to rewrite my own history even though (the trauma) it will always be there. Trauma means several things for me. It can be a particular event that has shaped me in a certain way or that still leads unconscionably some decisions that I make on daily basis; or a general figure that had, or has, an ongoing influence on many levels in my life with impact in my personality, my behavior, and patterns. Overcoming a trauma means that you have learned to regularly have a conversation with the patterns related to it, learned how to observe, and control the effect on your being in all levels. The idea is that I believe that we can’t always erase a trauma, we can learn how to accept it and embrace it and create a balance, a dynamic, because what we think it’s bad about us, it’s part of us, we cannot really take it away, only learn to live with it, because it’s going to be there till the end.

GABRIELLA

GABRIELLA: I’m not comfortable talking about specific events or trauma but for me it sat on my body, or it manifested quite physically if the form of eating disorders for a very long time. I also developed some physical aversion to touch, where in certain parts of my body I felt more uncomfortable to be touch by somebody else or even myself. And a big way I overcome that was thorough the form of tattoos. So, I’m a tattoo artist, and through my practice, to getting them to giving them, I gained more control of my body, of my body. I started doing tattoos, around the same time I started to heal from my trauma and deciding to love myself and enjoying in being in my body. Learning to tattoo and getting into tattoos, coincided with all these things. They are very connected to me. It’s two sided as well because my journey with my tattoos and me being able to give that to other people too. For me it’s decorating my skin, I can view my body as a gallery rather then something to be objectify. One of my friends wrote down a quote, she said “(tattoos) transforms the body into a gallery of inner evolution”. A lot of people I’ve met along my journey, I give or trade tattoos, also feel this way because it’s a very intimate experience you end up sharing a lot of things about the meaning of the tattoos but also the physical trauma of the process of getting the tattoo, it alters the relationship with your body and your perception of yourself.

TONY: When did you discover that getting tattoos was helping you?

G: I started getting them when I was eighteen, before I ever thought about dealing with my trauma. To start with it was just like skin stickers in my body because I thought it was cool. Once I became more self-aware and become more connected with my inner self and with my spirituality. The way I perceived everything changed. My practiced deepened with the terms of that. The physicality of getting tattoos, sitting with pain, choosing to put yourself through pain to adorn your body or do something that fill you. It’s a deep interesting process. If it’s something you were so afraid before, so then choosing to do it for yourself, and I do handpoke tattoos , so they take a very long time, so I’m sitting with that pain for six or seven hours and then your journey through that time and then each tattoo after that,... my relationship with pain has changed now, I know that I’m in control with how I perceive everything. If you tense away from it and are afraid, and you put your fear into that physical sensation, it gets bigger and bigger but if you breath into it, and are curious about it, you feel more comfortable, more in control of things like this. Once you start to think with intention and start to want to change something about yourself, you can find the help, the meaning, the beauty of everything you chose to.

JOANA

JOANA: My father died when I was five years old. I have absence of infantile amnesia, so I remember everything. Despite the enormous trauma, I didn’t have the space or time to suffer because I felt right away that my family felt worse than I did. I remember I felt sad for my mom and my brother, so I decided to reject that feeling and bring joy every day in the way that I could to them. That was my role.
Later when I was twenty-six, for professional reasons, I decided to start psychoanalysis – which I still do it to this day. It was then that I comprehend the impact of this trauma in my life. I accepted that and overcome in a sense of acceptance of the insuperability of this lost, of my father, specially to a little girl. As I took conscience of people’s finitude, at an age when we don’t fully understand the concepts of life and death, I stayed with a mark in my life that nowadays still impacts the choices I make, my fears, the way I live my life and even the way I let myself live.

TONY: At twenty-six, what led you to go into psychoanalysis? Do you think it was a natural desire that appear as you got older?

J: I always liked psychology in general but psychoanalysis particularly. I studied it in an informal matter during three months in Serralves. I applied it in the most diverse contexts: art, literature, music, and more. When I had a proposal for a very demanding job position, regarding the exposition it had and the leadership it required, I decided it was the right moment to explore my mind and make it more robust. It was then when I started to discover and to deal with my traumas. Today, after fifteen years, I know I’ll never be cured but I have a lot of tools that allow me to be happy and make other people happy too. That’s my goal in life.

PEDRO

PEDRO: I feel this moment was one the first when I understood what it meant to being different from everyone else that you were surrounded by. I thought about it for a long time when I was a child. And it’s a theme I still deal to this day. I used to go to a performing arts summer camp, and I know now as an adult how those camps cannot be the most accessible to everyone, and now I could understand how I wouldn’t be able to see more people of color there. In Portuguese black culture, I don’t feel that a lot of parents would be comfortable of getting their kids into a camp where they can sing, dance or act. I was the only black kid there. I was maybe twelve at the time, and there was a girl that would ask me a lot of times if I was feeling okay, with this concern and real worried feeling on her face. But on the last day, with a sense of pity, when I talked with her on why she would ask me that every day, she said “Don’t you think it’s strange that no one more of your species here?” Since I was child, I was more confused about the terms she used but not the ultimate message underneath that question. I know that today I will always be treated in a different way, either because of my skin or my sexuality. And back then, I also started to see how I only had girlfriends and to get in checked with my sexuality. Since I grew up in a bubble, I was surrounded by family friends that were white and my school was pretty diverse, so being in that camp was also the first time I was out of that bubble, out of my comfort zone, where I saw how people could react to my skin color or even my sexuality, and that was quite a traumatic shock at the time with similar situations happening.

TONY: And that made a great impact has a child?

P: I always was tried to be perfect when I was young, to be the perfect son or the perfect student to make my parents proud or because I felt society asked that of me. But it was something that felt natural to me to apply myself a lot into school because I believe that I wouldn’t be the most beautiful because I’m black, the most attracted because I was more feminine, so better I’d better be the most intelligent in class and since that help the other boys in exams. Because I had in my mind that I couldn’t be gay, black, and dumb, or else I don’t have nothing in life. And I was lucky that natural ii liked school and studying.

T: How do you deal with that now on a daily basis?

P: In regards of being a black person in Portugal, where there’s a lot of
racism still, and being black too in the gay community, and that intersectionality, it helped to remind myself that life’s short and I can’t live for others. The pandemic helped me a lot to see that anything can vanish out of nowhere. I don’t want to be fifty and feel I didn’t enjoy my youth because I was worried about what other people think about me. Now I only feel pity when people in my family or in my nuclear group of friends think a certain way about people of color or queer people.

T: But when did your mind shift and you started to feel that way?

P: I was seventeen when I moved to New York and got out of my comfort zone and started to deal with different realities. A lot of time we get stuck in this bubble of family and friends, and I believe it’s important to get out of this bubble and have these new experiences. I started to express myself in the ways I wanted. That city allowed me to discover myself and how I really see myself. Not only did I see people like me, being super comfortable in who they were but there was no need to feel shame or guilt about who I was. It was very liberating.

PHOTOGRAPHED IN PALÁCIO DO GRILO, LISBOA, PORTUGAL

“SWORDS” VALLECHI X ORELLANA - DAZED