Across a suite of lush, cinematic photographs, Yonga explores fitiavana, a Malagasy word that gathers together romantic love, familial love, friendship and the simple love of life. She digs into these different emotional bonds while also tracing how love is shaped by colourism, class, tradition and societal expectation. “For me, love is a way to understand another culture; [their] political and social context,” she says. “Society impacts our way of loving, of getting attached, of encountering relationships.” In Madagascar, she found that affection felt both tender and obstructed. For example, “You can’t marry who you want because of family pressure.” The island’s vast, fractured geography, also captured in the series, seemed to echo this emotional landscape. “Even if you have someone you love in the north or the south, the roads are bad, even the distances can be a problem.”

Love here, she realised, is shaped by roads and roots — cultural, class and ethnic. It exists in the tug between pride and rebellion, between belonging and want for freedom. “They are far from everything and very close to their culture, and proud of it,” she notes. Among the youth especially, she sensed both resistance and yearning, a pull toward ancestral customs and a personal desire for imported models. “I felt this impossibility but also a great desire to break it,” she reflects softly. “I think they are very romantic but also reserved and discreet.”

Shot on a Mamiya 7 film camera, her portraits feel warm and humid, layered with ambiguity. Oscillating between fiction and documentary, they are also carefully constructed, with false couples and staged interactions shot in their own homes and personal spaces. She gives her sitters emotional cues and narratives they can inhabit yet the relationships remains elusive, each scene blurring the lines between melancholy, boredom and yearning. “I want people to imagine how it can be [in Madagascar]— to be young, to be romantic, to be disappointed or frustrated about love, as everyone can, and I like you to have many interpretations of one image,” she smiles.

She works intuitively, discovering her subjects through encounter rather than casting call. “I find my models everywhere I can: in restaurants, on the street, at the foundation,” she says. “I want to be open to anyone.” Approached with upmost care and patience, she strives for respect while shooting, working with what they offer her in the moment. “When you shoot someone you take something from them so it’s not easy to find serenity. I just want them to feel that I’m trying to make them beautiful, not like models, but in their own way.” The results speak volumes as each subject radiates grace and authority. Their gaze never feel stolen; it is shared, like we’re being let in on something that would otherwise be kept under wraps.

As a Franco-Cameroonian artist, she is attuned to the lens. “Maybe being from Africa too, helps me to find my legitimacy. If I was a white person, it would bring more issues. And as a woman of colour, I connect more easily.” Still, her camera’s focus deliberately stops at one metre, making her images feel intimate but never invasive; near but not claiming. “It keeps a distance with my models to protect them,” she says.

Yonga’s landscapes feel equally permitted as she finds beauty in the seemingly mundane: a single flower, lace curtains drifting from a window, a piece of fruit. Madagascar’s lush forests, ochre earth and dense air all seep into her images. “Nature is not a mere backdrop but a sacred and active presence,” she notes in her artist text, framing these surroundings as a network of care and love for oneself, for others, for community, and for all living things. Throughout ‘(Tsy) Possible’, love stretches outward from family and community to land and sea as she brings the evident connections between emotions and ecology to life. “I really think love is everywhere,” she says “and you can share it with anyone you cross in your life.”

Completing the series has given her an understanding of love that is both idealistic and pragmatic. “Love is the noblest feeling but also the hardest,” she says. Neither naïve nor indulgent, it is a discipline that requires “resistance and resilience.” As ‘(Tsy) Possible’ reveals, it is shaped by social expectations, cultural pressures, geographies and the sheer effort required to sustain it. “It’s not easy to be free to love as we want, and even when we find it, it’s still work to maintain.”

Yonga speaks of returning to Madagascar, thinking often about her friends and the people she photographed, (“I share their hope for the country to change.”), and of continuing the project across other islands of the Indian Ocean. No matter where this ongoing inquiry takes her, the artist’s work will continue to insist on ambiguity as a form of truth. Her portraits neither confirm nor deny but allow, her muses neither trapped nor free. To look at ‘(Tsy) Possible’ is to feel that the impossible has already begun to shift.