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This year, we’re celebrating Pride by acknowledging the LGBTQIA+ community’s long-standing history of breaking down barriers and lifting each other up. Throughout June, we’re featuring customers who embody the reality that resilience isn’t only about being persistent—it’s also about becoming stronger than before. From building community, to fueling creativity and encouraging activism, we’re honoring the LGBTQIA+ community as a continual source of strength, evolution, and inspiration.
For Fela Gucci and Desire Marea, the pair behind performance art duo FAKA, representing Black Queer Culture in South Africa has led to the creation of a movement. Channeling their own lived experiences and those of their community into mediums like music, live performance, and photography, Fela and Desire’s work is unapologetically authentic. They talked to Squarespace about where they find inspiration, how they’ve found community online, and why resilience shouldn’t and doesn’t look the same for everyone.
Squarespace: FAKA has gained a growing following in South Africa and around the world. How did you two meet, and what motivated you to start collaborating with each other?
FAKA: We learned about each other through a friend in 2010, and later connected on social media, where we spoke and decided we had to meet. Our meeting was the beginning of a very strong friendship and one of the things that always connected us was our love for fashion, music, and art, which eventually led to us working together.
SQSP: As artists, where do you turn for inspiration?
FAKA: Black people inspire us a lot. Our ancestors are a major source of inspiration, as well as the ongoing unraveling of our lived experience.
SQSP: Your work extends beyond performance art. How does activism show up in what you do?
FAKA: Activism shows up in the very audacity to exist and be true to ourselves.
SQSP: What role does your online presence play in building community?
FAKA: Our online presence helps us connect with people we would otherwise have great difficulty connecting with. We have experienced a sense of community all over the world, with people we may have never had the pleasure of knowing, because of it.
SQSP: Squarespace is exploring the idea of ‘resilience as a revolution’ as it relates to pride. How does the idea of resilience factor into your definition of pride and your experience as part of the LGBTQIA+ community?
FAKA: Resilience is something that has propelled our community through great odds, where we see the revolution become a reality for some. It is something that must be celebrated, definitely. However, in our celebration of it, we should recognize the many forms of resilience so as to not alienate members of our community who cannot express resilience via visibility, activism, or any other commonly associated manifestation of it that relies on ableist performativity. We are all resilient in our own way.