The End of Earth Propaganda: Jordan Roger barré

17 June - 1 August 2026

Overview

In 2007, the Polish Kaczyński government led the Minister of National Education to draft a law aimed at prohibiting teachings that would constitute an "incitement to homosexuality" in schools. This proposal coincided with the release of the television series Teletubbies, in which the character Tinky Winky was strongly suspected of being homosexual. Ewa Sowińska, the Children's Rights Ombudsman appointed by the government, then called on psychologists to meticulously study this character, whose attitudes were deemed inappropriate. This example of a discriminatory measure, drowned in a constellation of queerphobic laws across continents and eras, nourishes Jordan Roger's reflections. The latter, a ceramicist and embroiderer,infuses his practice with a boiling anger. He tends to reclaim the violence of these discourses, and "incites" not homosexuality, but the abolition of LGBTphobia. In his research thesis, Les Aliens sont des travelos ("Aliens Are Drag Queens"), Jordan traces a section of queer history that looks at the invention of the term "uranist" or "uranian" by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs at the end of the 19th century. It was a matter of revisiting the naming of homosexuals by extracting themselves from a lexical field that was purely insulting. Designated as "feminine souls trapped in masculine bodies attracted to masculine bodies," and despite the now-refuted amalgam of this definition of homosexuality, uranism stands at the genesis of queer struggles: the first vocal reflections of a sociological and philosophical journey still ongoing. Jordan's essay then updates this discourse and takes hold of the representation of the alien as it is often brought forward in cartoons: a ridiculed homosexual, excessively effeminate. The recurrent involvement of aliens in Jordan Roger's works responds to this dehumanizing treatment in that this figure reclaims its freak preconceptions and displays a paradise elsewhere, an alternative to hetero-Earthling reality. Thus, queer identities taking on an extraterrestrial form implies the elaboration of a new mythology. Jordan draws from the Christian iconography in which he was immersed, raised by Jehovah's Witness parents. The myth of the Apocalypse notably fuels his Hell Soon series, deploying scenarios of glittery end-of-the-world settings inhabited by hybrid characters reveling in the burned vapors of a tattered patriarchy.In Mes Quatre Cavaliers ("My Four Horsemen"), pastiching the illustration of an ancestral prophecy, is inscribed: "Your God is not what you think he is. His four horsemen are not coming for me." The artist announces an LGBTQIA+ revolution by rewriting his own impenetrable sacred texts. Dogmatic fear changes sides: heterosexuals are the sinners. From the writing of this mythology emerges a modern ontology, a reinterpretation of hetero concepts. Jordan's works are all drenched in an almost ideological pink, from which stems the exacerbated use of traditional feminine codes to evoke the monochrome cell-bedroom of a child.Here, between revolted fairies and divine guardians of drag, the kitsch of the motifs undergoes a mutation.Chaos ends up organizing itself. Then appears the coherence of the cunt vocabulary: this language replays,and above all overplays, the stereotypes established by the normal hetero-Earthling. By choosing his models of representation, without opposing or conforming, the artist narrates a queer-centered history. Then, Earthling propaganda comes to an end. Heterosexuality, as a system of vertical domination, is absolved. The rigid boundaries it erected with heavy reliance on tiered wedding cakes—those celebrating the supposed unctuosity of man/woman love—are dismantled. No, it wasn't a phase, and you know it now.

Antoine Bouffard