We/Us is the UK’s first visual art project celebrating the undocumented presence of Butches and Studs from working class backgrounds. Using film photography as a medium, Roman Manfredi explores intergenerational female masculinity through the structures of class and race within the British landscape.
This extraordinary new solo exhibition by lens based artist Manfredi, co-curated by Ingrid Pollard, will be on show at Space Station Sixty-Five, 9 March – 3 June 2023. No ordinary portrait show, Manfredi presents forty-one framed photographs with an audio installation taken from interviews with the participants.
About Roman Manfredi:
When I left school at 16, I bought a local paper and sought the most creative job I could find – a darkroom assistant for a photography studio. I bought a second hand camera from a bloke in my local pub in Kings Cross and took pictures of some mates in a nearby mannequin factory. It was here that my first creative outlet was born. Photography seemed like an accessible creative medium for working class kids at that time.
Since then, I’ve gathered moss, travelled, worked and come full circle. I use photography and film to learn about and become intimate with my participants and their surroundings. My work explores concepts of identity through the everyday lived experience, seeking for creative ways to instigate dialogue. I lift something of past Dyke-dom and my own personal history and experiences. I am motivated by connective linkage and the need to contribute to archiving working class queer histories by working class artists.
Manfredi’s film, ‘Everything That I’m Not’ (15:11 mins, 2017) has been screened internationally. It is an experimental documentary that centres three Butch/Stud and Femme lesbian couples. The viewer is invited to share intimate fragments of the couples; lives, expressed through their domestic environment. By slowing down the process of perception, moments within an everyday setting provide a backdrop to stories that aim to capture the essence of the Butch/Stud and Femme dynamic.
Manfredi studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art st Central St Martin’s, 2005–2008, and Royal College of Art, 2010–2012.
The definition of Butch generally refers to a specific and deliberate female masculinity within a lesbian framework. Stud is an American term used by many younger Black masculine presenting lesbians in the UK. These identities are working class in origin.
This project has been generously supported by Space Station Sixty-Five, Space Art and Arts Council England.
