MOMOSTAR: FIRST DAY ON EARTH BY MAITE DE ORBE & JESSICA MADAVO
Creative Direction Maite de Orbe
Photography Jessica Madavo
Creative Production & Art Direction L’Oyin Ogunbusola, Coco Bagley, Flora Miles for ROT
Set Design Solène Riff
Styling Lorhaine Mendes
Movement Direction Zahra van Nguyen
Model Momostar by Maite de Orbe
Hair Sam Groeneveld using Bumble & Bumble
Makeup Tina Khatri
Photography Assistant Jeremiah Jim
Styling Assistant Yosan Michael
Set Design Assistant Raphaela Odunwo
Born out of the torn rim wheel of a car crash, MOMOSTAR is a vessel of entropic perversion, the thickness of heat in a dancefloor, the sublimation of violence, your personal mirror of stripped desire.
MOMOSTAR performs with a naked chest fully covered in sticker stars, acting as a weak shield, half innocent half luring, reflecting and refracting the light, or the gaze, becoming a mirror of your projection and a healing process of gender expression and movement, that to inhabit otherness is possible. Operating as an opaque, projected character exploring violence, tenderness, gender, belief systems, mythology and contemporary symbols, it is a surreal exercise to really see oneself.
“I wanted to explore why we need to believe in things, why we need pop stars to live crazy lives for us, why we need movements to follow and how all the above are, again, vessels of security, pulling from symbols of contemporary society. In a time where we don’t look up to mythology anymore, we’ve created new gods, in the constant fear of what actual freedom might look like.
When I started performing as MOMOSTAR I was still a photographer, and I still am, but felt the creative impulse to make images that would live, rather than being immortalised. I wanted to make an image with an audience, to not just see it, but embody it. MOMOSTAR is a photographic experience taken into ephemerality.”
MOMOSTAR: FIRST DAY ON EARTH is the birth of MOMOSTAR into a world where they need to figure out how to move, body unfamiliar to the space, a choreography of near-belonging, negotiating identity within environment.
Seen by Jessica Madavo, MOMOSTAR uses gaze as a tool, entering an infinity mirror, subverting the one directionness of photography, building identity with multiplicity.
