For BRICKS’ Rise Together Issue, we opened our platform to the GURLS TALK audience to share their understandings of why community is so important to them. In an open call, we asked creatives to submit work that best represents the word ‘community’ to them. The result? After delving through hundreds of submissions, we selected our favourite poems, pieces of writing, illustrations and photography. Meet some of the faces behind our collaborative curation with Adwoa Aboah’s platform below.
I created Black in Britain as space for people to come together and talk. It’s a place to relate to people who are going through the same thing. To network, create with each other and strengthen relationships. I want us to be seen in the UK as much as they try to hide us in history. We are here.
Stafi Samaki, founder of Black in Britain
“I’m a photographer from Brazil; my work mainly focuses on the power of women and their connections with themselves, other women, and nature.”
@isabelladiasx
“Community to me is about people coming together to stand up for a cause. This in itself forms a community united by a purpose to make a change by combing their voices but it also brings together people from all different cultural communities. This is why, for me, community is rooted in protest and activism.”
@sonny_flynn
“I am a photographer and collaborated for this submission with a great group of girls based in Bristol for my submission for what we feel that community is to us. I met Lara at BRICKS editor Tori West’s publication talk and we both said the plan and dream were to one day collaborate together to hopefully get published in one of her print issues. When I saw the GURLS TALK x BRICKS open call, I nearly fainted with excitement! I contacted Lara straight away and gathered a team of women who I am good friends with, told them my vision and we all bounced off each other creating this shoot.”
@iamabigalatia
Beyond Dee, photographer
Self-portraits with friends, Nicole Ngai
“This work is taken from my book ‘Threads’ which explores the complex relationships formed between a photographer and their subject, presenting a range of intimate photographic exchanges amongst friends. Through this collaborative process, the series aims to tackle the politics of self-representation under post-colonial culture.”
@nicole.ngaise
Gabriel Marino, photographer
“I chose to submit a selection of polaroid film that I took in Orlando, Florida’s queer nightclubs. Photographing these spaces is important to me and using polaroid film photography references the gay rights movement and club scene of the timeless 70’s and 80’s while staying contemporary and personal to my central Floridian queer community. It’s an ongoing personal project, a growing archive of exposures that means a lot to me, and shows what my community is like and the people in it.”
@gabemarino
These images originally appeared in The Rise Together Issue #7 of BRICKS Magazine.