A fantasized archeology of gay safe spaces in western Europe through real and imaginary archives (in progress)
'Ghost Spaces' is a fantasized archaeology of gay social spaces in Western Europe using real and imaginary archives. This project started with the chronic and progressive disappearance of gay men's meeting and sociability places. I began to build an archive by photographing their facades, bar interiors, meeting places in parks or undergrowth, details, objects. At the same time, I studied historical research on these precarious places, constantly disappearing, which hardly appear in official history, in art history or in popular histories, with the notable exception of legal history. It seemed right to me to recreate traces of these forgotten or prevented places.
I use AI as a tool to fantasize about these 'safe spaces' of which nothing remains or which could not have existed. It helps to invent other possible pasts, outside of a generalized repressive system. These imperfect images, full of 'glitches', illustrate the difficulty of representation, because the corpus of images (dominant vs. minority) made available by the algorithm of current tools often does not allow for the generation of precise and realistic images.
The project is not approached chronologically but is presented as a mille-feuille of personal, historical and artificial archives and fragments of historians' texts, a puzzle to try to create or reconstruct a clandestine and alternative history.
Collection of zines