Chloe Filani tells PinkNews how she uses art to express her identity. (PinkNews)
As Trans Awareness Week comes to an end, transgender artist, poet and activist Chloe Filani has explained how she uses art to express her gender identity.
Filani told PinkNews that art was one of the fundamental building blocks of her identity. “I find it very powerful being able to find my voice within that space and express myself out of just thinking about the worries and my transitioning and [to] be able to embody something else,” she said.
Filani’s work has taken her across the breadth of the artistic and activism world, from creating slam poetry that addresses the themes of racial injustice in modern UK politics, to using performance art as a tool to express her femininity and gender expression.
She was initially inspired by the Black transgender artist and writer, Juliana Huxtable, who rose to prominence in the New York art world through her exhibitions that explored ideas of identity and the body, particularly through the lens of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic that combines science fiction, history and fantasy to explore the African-American experience.
“It was seeing a Black trans woman [who] was able to exist and thrive, and she is successful,” Filani says. “She’s a Black American artist, poet, writer, DJ [and] model.
“Just seeing her exist and also be fab and beautiful was really encouraging. To know that I could actually live and thrive, and beyond surviving, to actually be.”
‘A lot of my creativity also intersects with my feminism’
Filani’s work particularly focuses on the playfulness and creativity of gender expression, using poetry as a way to explore, and dismantle, archetypes of femininity and masculinity that have been built over centuries.
“Poetry and creativity helped me explore my identity… the playfulness of what creativity is able to explore,” she said. “A lot of my creativity intersects with my feminism and a lot of Black feminist theories and understandings, and I see the sort of nuances and the difference of existing in the world as a Black woman and a Black trans woman.”
The unique part of artistic expression is that it’s able to break through the barriers of rigid gender roles that she faced when beginning her transition.
When she began to research content around transitioning, having questioned her identity, she was met with a lot of strict gender roles on how to be a woman but realised that these were a kind of prison.
“With my art, I was able to not just see other trans women within that space, but also the different ways in which women were able to be themselves within a creative space,” she said. “In my expression of my art, I’ve basically been able to find more comfort within my own voice and with my gender identity.
“Initially, I was quite scared of my voice and, with being a trans woman, there was a lot of, not just rules, but need for survival.
“I would train my voice to be more high-pitched but, because a lot of my art is using my voice, I became more comfortable with the power behind my voice and how it would be able to calm people [and] take up space in a room.”
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