Durimel: Brothers From an Island Not So Close
Jalan & Jibril. Two brothers. One lens. One radical vision. For them, the image is more than aesthetics — it’s an antidote to inner exile. Blurring the lines between photography, cinema, and diasporic identity, their work pulses with intimacy and universality. A relentless pursuit of meaning, of visibility, of self — carved through light and frame.
Stateless Twins, Rooted in Vision
Jalan and Jibril Durimel
« We’re not necessarily ‘cultured’ but we saw a bit more of what the world had to offer… more understanding of the intersections of life, is something we’d like to suggest – more exchange between nations – in our future work. »
Jalan and Jibril Durimel were born in Paris in 1993 to Guadeloupean parents, but they’ve never really had a place to call home. Guadeloupe, Miami, Saint Martin, Los Angeles, then back to Paris in 2020 — a fragmented childhood, fluid yet unanchored. Their visual language flows from this mosaic of worlds: raw elegance, quiet beauty, a stage where contemporary hybridity plays out.
What they carry with them is a memory of motion. A search for self in the silence between places. “I’ve never truly felt Caribbean, or Floridian, or even Parisian,” Jalan admits. Their identity lives in the in-between. That emotional no man’s land becomes their mother tongue — visual, visceral, unapologetically liminal.
And they speak it through images charged with deliberate melodrama — portraits that feel like single frames from an unspoken film, suspended in a space between vulnerability and unfiltered beauty.
When Fashion Becomes Storytelling
In the beginning, the twins dabbled in a “kinda cheesy” fashion blog, in their own words. But it didn’t take long before they broke free from the frame to capture the world outside of it. Wild street casting, natural light, and painterly compositions. For them, fashion became a canvas to tell stories, to immortalize lives.
From their first campaign for American Apparel, they moved on to collaborate with Kenzo, Chloé, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Grace Wales Bonner, developing an aesthetic that’s part dream, part documentary. In 2020, Vogue and i-D Magazine opened their pages to them. In 2024, Connor McKnight called on them for his AW collection, and Pop Magazine gave them its cover in March 2025.
Durimel, Pop Magazine, 2025
« What we want is for our photos to bring color into someone’s life. »
Durimel, Wales Bonner X Adidas 2023
Durimel, Chloe, Nama campaign (SS22)
Durimel, Chloe, Kattie campaign (SS22)
In 2023, they shot the Adidas x Wales Bonner campaign, blending sporty aesthetics with Afro-Caribbean elegance. On the music front, they worked with Sampha on the "Shy Light" project, exploring vulnerability and spirituality through minimalist visuals.
Durimel, Sampha, 2023
But they now turn down projects that feel "void of meaning." Fashion, yes — but only if it allows space for a narrative breath to unfold.
Cinema, Without Words
Trained in cinema in Los Angeles, their style draws heavily from the codes of emotional drama. Their influences? Melodramatic blockbusters like Titanic, the clear-cut imagery of Dr. Seuss, and Einstein’s straightforward logic (“If you can’t explain it to a child, you don’t understand it yourself”).
In video, their language becomes sensory. Their "Bet" music video for Mereba tackles taboo homosexuality in the Caribbean, with images where fists turn to glitter and punches transform into fireworks. They’ve also worked with Sampha, capturing a softer, introspective vibe.
Their way of filming: slow, textured, never illustrative. Each shot aims to make visible what is usually kept silent.
The Museum, At Last
In 2024, the Philharmonie de Paris dedicated an exhibition to them: "Durimel Publish Archive Imagery," a powerful museological gesture that places them in a lineage of diasporic visual memory. There, they reinterpret archives through photography, projections, and installations. An exhibition conceived as a suspended film, a non-linear narrative where identity is written in the light of bodies and sounds.
Other exhibitions include:
Island, The Community, Paris (2017)
Foam Talent, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2019)
Drawing a Blank, Ben Broome, Paris (2020)
Concrete Limbo, Haus der Statistik, Berlin (2020)
Coming of Age, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris (2022)
« We want to introduce you to our culture in a non-aggressive way, through the alchemy of grace. What can grace do for someone? And how can it transform the way we see Black people? »
Their artwork has also been showcased at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, in contexts blending music, art, and visual activism. The duo now aspires to integrate more deeply into artistic institutions: they speak of images "constructed like a feature film," and exhibitions as the "slow creation of meaning.
Other notable venues: – Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn, where they exhibit in mixed formats (photo, film, print) – Paris Photo (2022), in the emerging section – CLM Gallery, London, where their series Figures of Elsewhere (2023) was featured.
Towards the Unknown, Always
"Our comfort is uncertainty." They’re sculpting a new practice, somewhere between film and photography. Images as dialogues. Silent yet intimate narratives. Durimel is today — and it’s already tomorrow.
