Kai-Isaiah Jamal is a spoken word poet, performer, model and trans visibility activist using Instagram as a tool for good. Jamal draws on their own personal experiences as a transgender person of colour dealing with dysphoria, displacement and uncertainty - unraveling huge, universal themes through the lens of poetics online and bringing to us their audience in, concluding simply that to be human is to feel all of these things. As well as having a presence in so much of the current fashion imagery, Jamal hopes to be more than just a ‘face’. The aim for him is that young people might better see themselves reflected back in the advertising and marketing they digest.

About the project

" 'I am still blessed to be one one, before I am in one’ is a poem I performed and wrote, which explores the history of activism, speeches and self made stages. Heavily influenced and referenced by civil rights speeches, speakers corner, pastors and preachers, I wanted to pay homage to the people who have created platforms for themselves and what they stand for. Performed against a background of vast and endless see, I attempted to visually play with the idea that a stage is something that can be created anywhere if you have something to say. The poem pays huge homage to those ‘that belong to those; I belong to before I belonged to me’ and the lineage of people that I believe are an amalgamation of, as someone who stands in the intersections of many identities. I believe speech has been the longest, strongest and only currency that marginalised people have had for centuries and this is a celebration of that."

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