Radical Play, the photographic addition to the Radical Beauty (RB) Project, features two newly commissioned series of portraits highlighting four models with Down Syndrome in a collaboration between Radical Beauty and Central Saint Martins. It explores portrait photography through the interplay between subjectivity and representation.
At a time when the agency of these creatives as autonomous individuals is often challenged and contested as coercion, Radical Play questions the normative conventions of desire, and artistic expression, and firmly believes in the agency and autonomy of neurodivergent creative individuals.
Underpinning the rhetorics of play, the new commissions at display aim to challenge prejudices and preconceived notions of difference in the fashion and culture industries. Taking from its name, Radical Play emphasises play as a tool for communities to negotiate, construct, express identities and reinterpret societal expectations.
The exhibition calls for a new framework for what the creative community can become when barriers to access dissolve. It offers hope and confidence in challenging normative conventions of beauty and change towards expansive, innovative and inclusive realities.
Radical Play acknowledges that these models are neither mere representations of a label nor spokespersons for the entire Down’s community. What they are is a testament to the boundless capacities of the human spirit in expanding representation; they are artists in their own right.
design & code Mercè Lledós