Gaby K/Nell (she) was born in Mauritius Island, where she lived until 2019. 

In 2016, Gaby went to prison because of homophobic laws created in 1898 during the British colonization (article 250 of the Mauritian penal code) prohibiting « sodomy and bestiality » – a law which is still valid today in Mauritius. 

The Article 250 says that “any person who is guilty of the crime of sodomy shall be liable to penal servitude for a term not exceeding five years”. 

« I was lucky, I did not stay there for five years. 

Three days and two nights in jail are enough to understand the injustice we face for who we are. 

I never said anything about it. 

But this trauma had a great impact on my psychological health. It caused me a lot of sexual shame, depression, anxiety and early signs of OCD’s. I experienced my first panic attacks. And of course, my inner child’s joy and privacy felt violated by the authorities. I felt alone, misunderstood and I had a violent desire to leave my country. 

In prison, a police officer tried to flirt with me. Another one told me to go get exorcised by a priest. 

I felt sexualized, denigrated, reduced to a criminal and an abomination. 

In addition to all that, I have in my country experienced 18 years of constant discrimination, harassment, sexism, homophobia and transphobia – verbal harassment, at school and in the streets. » 

Driven by her desire to leave her country, Gaby graduated high school with the best results and won a scholarship. She also won a national talent competition, the Caudan Live, in the singing category, the prize being a sum of money which enabled her to pay her first year of art studies in France.

Today Gaby is a trans non-binary visual artist, performer, videographer and artistic director, living and working in Paris, France. 

After a year at the preparatory class of Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Gaby was admitted to the Beaux-Arts of Paris, where she is currently working on her projects within the dance-performance class of Emmanuelle Huynh and the video class of Angelica Mesiti.

Gaby’s artistic work is part of an autobiographical approach and/or self-fiction, mixing spirituality, science-fiction and queerness; sometimes adopting a decolonial approach, and often drawing inspiration from personal mythologies such as those of the witch or the extra-terrestrial.