Personal Work

Ballroom is Black
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

Ballroom is Black

For Bogotá’s Afro queer community, the ballroom scene is more than just a performance space, it’s a sanctuary, a battlefield, and a celebration of identity.

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The Transit Workers of Singapore
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

The Transit Workers of Singapore

At this moment, more than 900,000 migrant construction workers are living in custom-built dormitories on the margins of society in Singapore, which has an increasingly ambivalent attitude to their presence.

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The Meaning of Things
Manu Valcarce Manu Valcarce

The Meaning of Things

For over a year, I worked alongside the team at Making Room, a grassroots organisation offering a radically different approach to hoarding. Instead of enforcing “deep cleans” where the state or landlords enter a person’s home and clear it out in a matter of days, Making Room offers a process of therapeutic decluttering. It is slow, intentional, and deeply human work.

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The Other Side of Rio
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

The Other Side of Rio

Since losing its capital status to Brasília in 1960, Rio has been in decline. Investment dried up, brains and businesses fled to arch-rival São Paulo and violence became endemic.

The number of favelas, hill-side slums, grew exponentially. In these places, everything from traffic violations to murder seemed to go unpunished. The drug trade took hold. The city became divided into two different worlds.

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Ebe Oke
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

Ebe Oke

Composer, Performer and Multimedia Artist.

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When All is Lost, the War is Won
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

When All is Lost, the War is Won

The phenomenon of urban exodus during Spain's crisis suggests a move back to the roots of a less financially oriented economy of sustainability.

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The Living and the Dead
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

The Living and the Dead

After the death of my father, I found myself in unfamiliar terrain — not only of loss, but of silence. In the West, death is sterilised, hidden behind hospital curtains, funeral home walls, and euphemisms. It is something to be feared, ignored, or managed discreetly. But grief, I soon discovered, has no interest in discretion. It led me to question how other cultures approach death — not as an end to be hidden, but as a moment of meaning, a rite of passage, a continuation…

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The Warias
Raffaela Lepanto Raffaela Lepanto

The Warias

A journey into the world of Indonesia’s third gender.

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