‘These bouts had cash prizes and offered a way for insecure young people to feel good about themselves using the only thing they had: their bodies’

I was born near Paris but grew up on Nosy Be, a small island off the northwest coast of Madagascar. My mother is Malagasy and British, my father is Italian, and I had a relatively privileged middle-class childhood. Partly because of that, and partly because I don’t look like a Malagasy person, I always felt a sense of disconnection. Madagascar is of course a former French colony, and I went to a French-speaking school. By age 10, I’d lost the Malagasy language, despite having spoken it fluently when I was younger.

My sense of not belonging only deepened when I moved to France to study in 2009. But in photography I found a way to start exploring my feelings about Madagascar and a way to reconnect. When I want back to visit my family one summer, all my friends were talking about this martial art, moraingy. These bare-knuckle fights had been practised in Madagascar for hundreds of years, but I hadn’t attended any before and it was the first time I’d really heard people talking about it. My friends told me: “We have to go to the village near your house. They’re having this event and we have a friend who’s going to fight.” I thought, “Sounds fun.” I realised it could be an opportunity to take some strong pictures.