Angels Among Us: Angelito Collective
ANGELITO COLLECTIVE wear JEANS by TELFAR, SHOES by PUMA, RAMIE wears HEADCAP, BOXER SHORTS by BRYAN JIMENÈZ
During that same transformative year, Demíyah and Sol Angel crossed paths with Miss Kam and Sinn, two creatives that have remained integral members of their collective ever since. Together, the collective birthed their debut film, Toxic, a transgressive narrative delving into the everyday trials of Black trans femmes navigating the labyrinthine challenges of a heteronormative world. Even as the shadows of cultural hegemony, Eurocentrism, and post-colonial trauma persistently cast their long shadows over colonized communities self-perceptions and identities, it is in dynamic cultural hubs like New York City and through visionary groups like this chosen family that the promise of social transformation takes root.
Today, the collective consists of five talented individuals: Demíyah, Sol, Kam, Sinn, and Ramie. Together, they have cultivated a burgeoning community of Black and Brown trans and queer individuals radiating a deep sense of creativity and purpose evident in all they do. Their sophomore film, CIÓN MAMI, debuted on office’s digital platform in 2022, and was presented at the London Fashion Film Festival and Fashion Film Festival Milano this year; the collective has also cultivated an influential partnership with New York It brand Luar. This past summer, the collective took center stage with their Jeffrey Campbell partnership campaign, which contributed a generous 25% of the proceeds to their dinner series for Black trans siblings. Through their tireless efforts, the collective stands as the driving force behind the scenes: producers, directors, hair and makeup artists, and photographers — all positions typically dominated by a particular social group — forging a path for future generations and leaving behind a legacy fueled by radical creativity.
Ultimately, it all comes back to the collective’s overarching mission: to carve out new spaces where trans individuals and queer souls can discover a profound sense of belonging. For this issue of office, it only felt natural to invite the siblings to grace our pages and share their world-building vision.
ANGELITO COLLECTIVE wear FULL LOOK by ANONYMOUS CLUB, SHAYNE OLIVER, SHOES by PUMA
Sahir Ahmed— Talk to me about the dinners you’ve been doing.
Demíyah— So we started the dinners in our homes with close friends and loved ones, then people started noticing and reaching out to invite us into their spaces to collaborate on them so we decided to open it up to the community. We all naturally benefitted from cultivating that kind of space because so much of the first year of our experiences was oversaturated with nightlife and the day-to-day of trying to get by and make a living in New York. In the long-term, I think it’s important for us to have spaces to heal and rest so that we’re able to regain our energy and show up in the work that we’re doing at a greater capacity, especially because so much of what we do requires us to create and curate spaces for large groups of people; how we treat ourselves within our group is the kindness that we want to extend out to the community as well.
We just did our seventh dinner and this week we’re beginning to plan for our eighth dinner, which will be this upcoming fall.
Sahir— I love that you bring up this point of self-care and how that relates to being part of a community. How does that show up in your connection and the world that you’re cultivating?
Demíyah— When we started the collective, Sol and I were conceptualizing during the peak period of isolation in 2020. I was in Toronto and she was in New York. In that time, I was in deep reflection on the life I wanted to create and claim for myself. To build the foundation of my new future I surrendered to loving the parts of myself I feared. At the start of the pandemic, my mom and I got our yoga teaching certification together. Through this practice I was self guided back into my body and spirit as so much of how I learned to survive up to that point was by disassociating from my being.
Sinn Apsara— For me, self-care is obviously about taking care of yourself, but also taking care of the people around you. Before the collective, I was by myself, I didn’t have any sisters, so I was super aware of looking out for myself, especially navigating life in the city as a trans woman.
You know, shaking ass is a lot of fun but going out is such a miniscule moment and as a group we sit around often and just have conversations, which is one of the ways that we take care of each other; if everybody has a great mental state then every moment becomes that much more gratifying.
Miss Kam— Nightlife can become a sort of escape for trans people and that’s how most of us connect to each other, but Demi has become a great way to reconnect with myself and being around the girls made it easier to get to where I am at in my transition. A lot of people look at medical transition as such a scary change, but since the beginning I’ve seen it as a way to connect to my body, ancestors and the spiritual nature of my existence.
Sol Angel— Kam really carried that, but I’ll just add that it takes a sisterhood to remind you of the importance of showing up for yourself and to reflect and recognize all aspects of yourself, the positive and the negative. There was a time where we were partying so much and I wasn’t being mindful about the way that I might have been coming across or how I was expressing myself and it had everything to do with not being necessarily happy with where I was in my life and certain things I had to revisit and heal from, but my sisters inspired me to choose better for myself. I think self-care can look like therapy in many ways.
Sahir— Kam, you bring up this point about medical transition being a way to connect with your spiritual self, which feels especially relevant this year with all of the bans that are being enacted against trans health care.
Kam— I've always been really fascinated by scientific intervention in movies and novels because there’s so much about our world as humans that we don’t understand. There’s this idea of categorization and of keeping your physical self aligned with what “God decided for you” and I spent a large part of my childhood in Texas, in the bible belt, so I was surrounded by these conversations constantly. The irony is that these surgeries and medical processes aren’t unique to trans people even down to actual hormone therapy. What I’m putting into my body is no different from acne medication or birth control and there’s a lot of hypocrisy in the medical industry when it comes to what’s OK to do regarding the body. The idea that we are unable to birth is one of the main arguments used to invalidate our experiences and my mother conceived myself and my siblings through in-vitro fertilization so even that experience isn’t unique to trans women.
RAMIE wears HEADCAP by BRYAN JIMENÈZ
ANGELITO COLLECTIVE wear FULL LOOK by ANONYMOUS CLUB, SHAYNE OLIVER, SHOES by PUMA
Demíyah— Growing up, there was a polarity between my Jamaican side of the family being Jehovah Witnesses and my mother’s Hispanic side being non-denominational. My mother’s side held space for me to be a bit more expressive, but my father’s always made me feel more conscious of how I was acting or being received. Their beliefs were projected onto me from a young age and when I became conscious of my identity, I developed so much fear of the liberation I aspired to embody. When I started medically transitioning at 15, I accepted the reality that I fell victim to conditional love that I could l not carry on with me into the next life I was creating for myself. With Angelito, I birthed my own family authentically rooted in unconditional love that serves to nurture and divinely protect me.
Sahir— What I recognize with you and the work you’re doing is a narrative driven by love, not fear, or control, which is what dominates thought in so many places.
Kam— The only thing that’s natural in the world is the desire for beauty and socialization, so it’s normal for us to center our perception on being perceived a certain way. We're all animals. Transitioning feels like the most animalistic thing and truly human thing that we could do. All animals shed their skins and evolve in their lifetimes.
Sinn— Growing up I had an aunt that was trans and her transness spoke through her work. There’s this idea in science that energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred, and I remember when she passed and I was at her funeral, I declared that her legacy will live through me and I felt the utmost warmth in my chest as if she literally implanted herself in me.
Sahir— What has it been like multiplying these spaces that aren’t necessarily widespread yet through the work that you do?
Sinn— The world is set up to benefit a small demographic, those that fit into and follow the rules that are made. Once you realize these rules are fake, it becomes a snowball effect.
Kam— I've always been a very intuitive person and I’ve sort of already envisioned everything I’m experiencing in my life right now. Meeting the girls felt cosmically aligned and now that we’ve shared space and ideas the way we do, the work just pours out naturally.
Sol— When I was at Parsons, I felt a lot of power in creating with people that share similar interests so from the beginning, knowing that I had Demi made it that much easier for me to imagine and call things to myself. Our first conversation when we started creating Toxic was that it would take us around the world and lead to so many opportunities and we weren’t wrong. Being able to bring in Sinn, Kam and Ramie just gave our world deeper meaning. It inspires a lot of people and that’s what keeps us pushing forward. We’ve already reached a lot of our goals and having Ramie document all of it just makes it that much better. We’ll have something to look back at and will be able to sustain and inspire a community beyond the time that we have here on earth.
Sahir— How are you planning to preserve what you do?
Demíyah— There’s been a huge erasure of our Transcestors for so many decades. I think seeing and connecting to the ancestry of our community is imperative and valuable. We are conscious of creating a legacy that stands the test of time in all the work that we do and there’s so much power in being able to present that. We’ve been intentionally documenting our lives over the last couple of years and for us it’s so important to be able to create tangible artifacts of our existence.
Ramie Ahmed— Yes we just have such an expansive archive of images and videos of events and outings we’ve done or just attended as a collective. It will feel so heartwarming for us and others to look back on and just be hopeful and assured that no one is alone in the world and it's possible to find a chosen family and a community that cares all while living a joyful life.
And like Angel said our archive will be here long after we’re gone so it’s sort of a gift for those to come. A capsule that proves our community walked this earth and spaces that truly existed and can continue to exist.
Even just knowing we have preserved so many individual’s existence within our community resonates the same feeling I get whenever I see a photograph of Marsha P. Johnson in the 70's or other legends. It's liberating to know that photographically people existed, they weren't myths, they were all real. Their power attracted people and their cameras to them to prolong their life even after they’ve left this world.
Sahir— Sinn, you just made a collection and shot a campaign for that right?
Sinn— Yes, it was such a beautiful experience; the garments became their own entities. Being able to go upstate to Star Route Farm and shoot the campaign for it on my birthday was also such a big deal because my birthday became a traumatic time for me for a while.
Kam— Everything Sinn does I’m inspired by. She knows so much about textiles, fabric, and has a rich taste that emanates from her Cambodian background. It was inspiring to me and I’m always inspired by everyone here and how deeply connected they are to our cultural backgrounds. Being African American and growing up in the South, there’s so much of a disconnect from my heritage so it’s nice when I get to know people who are connected to these things. Working on the campaign took a lot of determination. We were waking up at the crack of dawn most days. We barely had a budget.
ANGEL wears HEAD PIECE by RANXELLE SORIA, DRESS by ZHEXUAN HU, JEWELRY is TALENT’S OWN, SHOES by PUMA
Demíyah— This project was so special to shoot. There’s just a great belief system and trust amongst all of us that I truly feel like we can actually read each other's minds. We have a collective intuition that feels so evident in all of our work and I think that is what draws people in. The collection is far more than just garments. There’s a story interwoven with the fabric of every garment and being able to go upstate to Star Route Farm, who we collaborate with for food for our dinners, was full circle.
Sinn— Connecting back to what we were talking about with documentation of our lives. Kam and Ramie are family so to be shot through their lens, I feel like I’m actually being seen as who I am, as an artist, rather than just a trans person who happened to create a collection.
Kam— I personally battle with that, being captured as a “trans” person because it feels like everything always gets centered on our identities first and not on the fact that we’re artists. That’s a bit of a double-edged sword because yes my identity is such a big part of my work and personhood, so being able to work on our own projects, like the film, made by us, is the middle ground we look for. We’re talking about universal themes of being a human and we record that from a trans lens because it’s who we are.
Demíyah— Our work is euphoric because it’s a safe space for us. We don’t feel like we’re being objectified. We’re actually able to capture each other through our own purity and to reflect the love that we see in one another. Ramie doesn’t like to take up space often but he’s like our baby brother and our work wouldn’t be as impactful without his support so I'd love to open up the conversation to him.
Ramie— I can say the work has and will always be impactful with or without me. Sinn, Angel, Demi, and Kam’s force is so powerful that I was a bit intimidated accepting a role as a member of the Angelito Collective. I honestly thought to myself: “What can I offer? Will I change the dynamic? Would I change how the collective is perceived considering I am not trans?” But we’ve accepted none of that matters, that we’re a family that loves and respects each other and together there is nothing we can’t accomplish collectively. I am just grateful to have people to constantly turn to, hang out with, and circulate our passionate ideas everyday.
DEMI and SOL ANGEL wear FULL LOOK by ANONYMOUS CLUB, SHAYNE OLIVER, SHOES by PUMA
RAMIE wears HEADCAP, BOXER SHORTS by BRYAN JIMENÈZ, SHOES by PUMA, SINN wears JEANS by TELFAR, SHOES by PUMA
Sahir— Through the work that you do you’ve been able to position yourselves as photographers, stylists, creative directors, and more to create images that portray yourselves through your own lens, which is so important. What do you envision for the Angelito Collective as a creative agency and production suite?
Demíyah— When we first started the collective we had the intention of amplifying our own voices and stories as we were aware of the constant exploitation our community falls victim to in the creative industries. In the development of this unprecedented legacy we are building it was important for us to create a platform where our bodies and identities aren’t controlled by an external narrative. We are archiving and documenting our lives as a means to immortalize our collective power.
Through our chosen family we have held space to foster and nurture our artistry. I am so blessed to confidently say that I am in an era of life where I get to create a utopia with the people I love.
Our work speaks to the self love we have harnessed in ourselves and has warranted a sense of true liberation in our ever evolving transcendental skin. We unapologetically take up space because we know it within ourselves that we are worthy of being celebrated and seen. A picture tells a thousand words, but our words, our voice and our bodies tell a story of the thousands of lives before and after ours. Our art is an expression of our gratitude to the divine sacrifice and selflessness of the trans women that graced this earth before us. We are born again.
Angel— I envision the Angelito collective serving as the status quo in the production industry. These industries are usually dominated by white cis hetero folks. There should be a standard that is upheld when asking queer/trans folks to be part of your production. Respect is at the top of that experience, so much creativity comes from our communities — when you ask queer / trans folks to be part of your production they usually end up doing way beyond what they’ve been asked to do on paper and that’s so unfair.
I believe a way to ensure that we’re being protected is by placing more queer and trans folks in positions of power. We’re cultivators of communities and we deserve to be part of every step of the process, not just some last minute thought in which your budget won’t even allow for proper pay!
With all that being said the Angelito Collective is perfectly equipped to come into your production space and ensure that anyone queer and trans are well represented in these spaces, as well as setting the standard for what it looks like to empower and uplift creatives who exist within these spaces.
