A fantasized archeology of gay safe spaces in western Europe through personal, historical and imaginary archives (in progress)
“Our queer histories are fragmented histories—puzzles for which we struggle to gather all the pieces, catching only a fleeting glimpse of what the fully reconstructed picture might look like (…) Histories left unspoken, erased from official narratives, which have relegated us to the silences of the past—much like the lives of all marginalized groups.”
Mathias Queré, in Trou Noir, a journal of sexual dissidence, No. 3, September 2024
(In reference to Renaud Chantraine’s thesis, ‘Memory in Pieces: An Ethnography of the Heritage-Making of LGBTQI Minorities and the Fight Against AIDS’)
“Espaces fantômes” (Phantom Spaces) is aiming at building a phantasmagorical archaeology of gay spaces in Western Europe using real and imaginary archives.
“Espaces fantômes” started from the 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… At the same time, I studied historical research on these precarious places which hardly appear in official history with the notable exception of legal history.
“Espaces fantômes” also uses artificial intelligence as a tool to fantasize about those “safe spaces” of which nothing remains or which never existed, to shed light on shadowy areas of history and re-enact other possible pasts, outside a generalized system of repression.
These imperfect images, full of 'glitches', illustrate the difficulty of representation, as the images made available by the algorithms often do not allow for the generation of realistic images.
This project is not chronological but a puzzle which tries to create a clandestine and alternative history.
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