The Gélédé Queens
Destinie Adélakun - Photography + Scupture
2023
Gélédé Queens is a conceptualized depiction of Gélédé from the lens of Queer diaspora.
Taking on the notions of men dressing like women and relating it to the gender-bending art form of drag,
Destinie has visually curated an “African Drag” version of Gélédé exploring the truths that have been denied
and the apparency of gender non-conformity in African mythology and spirituality.
Gẹlẹdẹ Queens
by Destinie Adélakun
Gẹlẹdẹ Queens is a fine art photography and performance project that reimagines the iconic West African Gẹlẹdẹ masquerade through a contemporary diasporic lens. Honoring the sacred tradition that uplifts the Ìyàmi, the powerful, enigmatic maternal lineages of Yoruba cosmology, his body of work reflects on how masquerade has always been a spiritual technology for reverence, resistance, and transformation.
Historically, Gẹlẹdẹ began as a sacred feminine rite led by women, but by the 13th century, it was appropriated and continued by cisgender men who performed in masks to venerate the very women whose powers they both feared and relied upon. Gẹlẹdẹ Queens critically reflects on this shift, rebalancing the narrative by foregrounding the feminine and gender-nonconforming energies that have always been embedded in masquerade.
Destinie Adélakun’s portraits and short film form a visual counter-archive, reclaiming ancestral iconography while challenging rigid gender binaries. Through sculptural headdresses, adorned textiles, and choreographed movement, her subjects embody Gẹlẹdẹ as both an act of homage and a site of spiritual embodiment. The work resists fixed notions of gender, instead invoking the fluid, ceremonial roles that existed before colonial and patriarchal distortions.
In the film component, a duet of dancers moves through a colonial interior, a gesture of spatial reclamation that recalls how West African masquerade traditions seeded resistance and performance rituals across the Atlantic, including the roots of Caribbean carnival. It is a meditation on memory, exile, and return.
Gẹlẹdẹ Queens is ultimately a ceremony of remembrance and revision. It restores visual and cultural agency to the ancestral mothers, while also expanding the space for queer, trans, and gender-diverse expressions within diasporic spiritual traditions. It invites viewers to witness Gẹlẹdẹ not as folklore, but as living mythology, one that continues to evolve through reclamation, art, and embodied reverence.
