Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture at ArkDes

‘Cruising’ describes the quest for sex by homosexual men in public spaces. It is an urban pursuit taking place in parks, public toilets and car parks, as well as in dedicated establishments such as sex clubs and bathhouses. But cruising cannot be reduced to neither men nor gays, nor to any definite location. The historical model of cruising is evolving.
Presenting the many facets of cruising culture through the work of international architects, designers and artists, Cruising Pavilion explores a sexual and spatial practice that spans historical and contemporary culture. The combination of digital hook-up apps, urban development, and the commodification of LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual and Queer +) cultures means that traditional cruising grounds are continually adapting. Geospatial technologies have generated a psychosexual geography that spreads across digitally-connected homes and profiles.

The exhibition presents cruising as the producer of a non-hetero architecture that closely mirrors the patriarchal nature of the built environment. Cruising is at once revealed as a resistance, an avant-garde and a vernacular, with an active relevance in and beyond LGBTQ+ circles.

Cruising Pavilion at ArkDes is the culmination of two years of research. Previous exhibitions of the project in Venice, Italy (Spazio Punch), and New York City, USA (Ludlow38), have explored the different directions by which cruising practices have evolved. In this third and final edition, Cruising Pavilion focuses on the intersection of sexuality and the architecture of the city.

Participants

Andreas Angelidakis
Monica Bonvicini
Tom Burr
Shu Lea Cheang
Victoria Colmegna
Earl Combs + Steve Ostrow
Etienne Descloux
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
DYKE_ON
Pol Esteve + Marc Navarro
General Idea
Robert Getso
Horace Gifford
Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Nguyen Tan Hoang
Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation)
Studio Karhard
Ann Krsul + Amy Cappellazzo + Alexis Roworth + Sarah Drake
John Lindell
Henrik Olesen
Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo)
Hannah Quinlan + Rosie Hastings
Carlos Reyes
Prem Sahib
Jaanus Samma
S H U I (Jon Wang + Sean Roland)
Max Sohl + Paul Morris
Charles Terrell + Bruce Mailman
Tommy Ting
Madelon Vriesendorp
Steven Warwick
Robert Yang
Trevor Yeung

Cruising Pavilion: Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, Charles Teyssou
Curator at ArkDes: James Taylor-Foster
Production Assistant: Elisabet Norin
Editor (Swedish): Annie Jensen
Proofreading: Shumi Bose, Daniel Golling
Light Design: El & Scenteknik AB
Installation: Markus Eberle, Stefan Mossfeldt
Production (Programming): Elisabet Schön
Graphic Identity: Studio Reko →

Cruising Pavilion at ArkDes is an exhibition by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou (Cruising Pavilion) with James Taylor-Foster (Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Design, ArkDes).

West Side Club (2018), conceived by Carlos Reyes for Cruising Pavilion and designed by Dinamo with Laurence Favez, is an open source typeface connected to this exhibition. Download the font →

With support from Institut Français de Suède. Thanks to Sexperterna, RFSL Stockholm.

Cruising Pavilion →

The exhibition contains explicit works depicting sex and is not recommended for people under the age of 15. Cruising Pavilion: Arkitektur, gaysex och cruisingkultur broschyr →It’s fitting that Cruising Pavilion’s last chapter takes place in an actual pavilion, a structure called Boxen, housed inside one of the museum’s two main halls. Designed as a space for progressive programming by Dehlin Brattgård Arkitekter, with industrial finishings and a circular cut-out which, given the context, made me think of a giant glory hole, the room-within-a-room felt the perfect backdrop for the show’s radical subject matter. Michael Bullock for PIN-UP → As cruising often adopts street-like and derelict architectural spaces, it's necessary to formulate the architectural vernacular of what cruising spaces for a breadth of genders and sexualities might look like. Cruising Pavilion in Dezeen → Med Cruising Pavilion vill man se på gaysex med ett arkitektoniskt öga. Erik Galli for Bon → In a critical acknowledgment of the diversity among those who have historically engaged in cruising, the installation in Stockholm explores it as a pursuit undertaken by groups other than cis-gendered gay men. The Architect's Newspaper → Just därför är ArkDes utställning kanske en av de mest intressanta på länge. Men förutom de förväntat upprörda kommentarerna i extremhögerns media så väntar jag på debatten om staden som inte enbart skall rensas upp för att bli så mycket Pleasantville att ingen som bryter mot kärnfamiljsnormen (hetero- som homo) får ens det mest undanskymda utrymmet att fröjdas på. Jon Voss for QX → Det är just i spänningen mellan trögrörlig institution och subkulturell flyktighet som poängen med ArkDes utställning Cruising Pavilion kan skönjas. Philip Warkander for Expressen → The themes of Cruising Pavilion go beyond heteronormative sexual practices, and reach further than simply invoking spaces and designs that concern men who have sex with men: cyborgsex, female self-satisfaction and polyamory are all addressed via ﬁlm screens, computer games and drawings. Katharine Bonnevier for Disegno → What is extremely interesting architecturally is that visibility, orientation, and fluids are precisely at the core of cruising architecture. Toilets and bathhouses are dedicated spaces for bodily urban fluid management, parks are naturally labyrinthine spaces that are hard to surveil and often most active at night, and darkrooms deploy all of these attributes through architecture and design. Cruising Pavilion in conversation with Glass Bead (2019) →

Cruising Pavilion
Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture

Participants

Images from the exhibition