ARCHITECTURE: Cruising Pavilion
The word Cruising usually describes the quest for sexual encounters between homosexual or bi men in public spaces, but it cannot be reduced to neither men nor homos. This sexual practice generally takes place in public sites like parks, toilets, and parking lots, or in dedicated establishments like bathhouses and sex clubs.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Cruising Pavilion Archive
The informal sexual use of spaces like bathrooms, parks, parking lots, bathhouses and back rooms is celebrated at the “Cruising Pavilion” presented at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Originally emerged as an argot “code word” in gay slang, whereas most heterosexuals, on hearing the same word in the same context, would normally misread the speaker’s intended meaning in the word’s more nonsexual sense. This served and still serves as a protective sociolinguistic mechanism for gay men to recognize each other, and avoid being recognized by those who may wish to do them harm in broader societies noted for their homophobia. According to the Curators “By featuring contributions from artists and architects, the Cruising Pavilion wishes to highlight the failure to consider Freespace as defined by this edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, without questioning the hetero-normative production of space itself. Architecture is a sexual practice and cruising is one of the most crucial acts of dissidence”. From the 19th century Vauxhall pleasure gardens in London to the 80’s Mineshaft BDSM club in New York, the “Cruising Pavilion” looks at the architecture of cruising. Somewhere between anti-architecture and vernacular, the spatial and aesthetic logic of cruising is inseparable from the one of the proper metropolis. Relegated to the realm of depravity, it feeds off its most structuring disciplinary features. In the bathrooms built for cleanliness and the parks made for peacefulness, and also through the figures of the policeman and the flâneur, the modern city is cruised, dismantled and made into a drag of itself. Participants: Alison Veit, Andreas Angelidakis, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Atelier Aziz Alqatami, Carlos Reyes, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, DYKE_ON, Etienne Descloux, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Henrik Olesen, Ian Wooldridge, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Monica Bonvicini, S H U Í (Jon Wang & Sean Roland), Studio Karhard, Studio Odile Decq, Özgür Kar, Pascal Cribier & Louis Benech, Pol Esteve & Marc Navarro, Prem Sahib, Tom Burr and Trevor Yeung.
Info: Curators: Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault and Charles Teyssou, Spazio Punch, Giudecca 800/o, Venice, Duration: 24/5-1/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.cruisingpavilion.com
