Skin and Grace – Episode I
Gazing Soft: The Macho and the Muse
プロジェクト概要.
I arrived in Cuba to meet five professional dancers, drawn to a grace I had known only through screens and fleeting digital fragments. I wanted to photograph their bodies, of course, but above all to capture what remains when movement stops: an inquiry into masculinity in a country where the body is at once discipline, resistance, and identity.
Joining the Cuban group was David, who traveled from Bucaramanga. A companion in many of my projects, he has become a steady presence in my work. William and Andrés were meant to be there as well, but both had to withdraw at the last moment — a quiet reminder that every creation is a fragile balance between desire, possibility, and chance.
キューバ生まれで、この旅の要となる段取り役でもあるケリーに導かれながら、私は厳格さと脆さが同居する島と向き合った。そこでは、明文化された規則と、言葉にならない不文律が、一歩一歩の振る舞いを決めていく。同行したのは小さなクルー——映像のレナ、そして音響のミシェル。私たちの周囲には、熱帯のウイルス、突然の発熱、朽ちかけたダンスホール、そして意地のように生き延びる美しさが広がっていた。
The first images took shape in Havana, on its streets and inside the Escuela Nacional de Ballet: bodies moving beneath faded vaults, framed by windows crossed by ancient light. Then came the journey south — waterfalls, beaches, towns suspended in time.
予期せぬ出来事——病、離脱、欠落——が絶えず道筋を塗り替え、そのたびに私は、進行形のままプロジェクトを組み替え直すことを強いられた。
It was there that a second presence appeared: the students. Sixteen and seventeen years old, still suspended between childhood and the discipline of adulthood. Their bodies carried promise more than certainty, softness more than definition. They were not yet dancers, not yet men, but already deeply shaped by expectation.
This first book and film follow four professional dancers.
Their lives, their discipline, their private struggles, and the fragile balance between strength and exposure.
It is about bodies already shaped by choice, sacrifice, and survival.
One reveals what discipline produces.
This is a portrait of masculinity in its present tense.
Skin and Grace – Episode II
The Becoming
Introduction
We met them when they were sixteen and seventeen, at the threshold of adulthood. Students of the Escuela Nacional de Ballet of Havana. We photographed their bodies as they were: uncertain, elastic, not yet fully claimed by identity or performance.
This second chapter begins two years later. In 2027, we will return to them as young adults, when time has crossed their bodies, when choice, fatigue, ambition, and compromise have begun to leave their marks.
This is no longer about professional lives already in motion, but about formation itself. About what is still open. About what is being shaped.
What remains of softness?
What has hardened?
What has been lost, and what has been gained?
If the first book was about grace as lived experience,
this second becomes grace as emergence.
Together, the two works form a single arc:
One reveals what discipline produces.
The other reveals what discipline begins.
This is a portrait of masculinity in its becoming.
