contragenics
New York has become a kind of longing for me, one that grows in parallel with my aging. Particularly, my New York, the one I experienced having just arrived almost thirty years ago. The memories, or their distortions, have transformed into something else that has little to do with memory. It doesn't even have to do with the past.
I arrived in New York in 1998. I was twenty years old. That's the age of my university classmates now, and I can't imagine any of them moving to the other side of the world, especially since they're children. I was a child myself. And so, for me, New York, more than a space of memory, is transfigured into a magical place to which I desperately long to return.
It is in this context that the images of Contragenics* are born. The initial idea stemmed from the frescoes on the vault by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, ‘Il Baciccia’, for the Church of the Gesù in Rome from 1679. It was about bringing Baroque theatricality to the nights of The Roxy of the New York that I knew. The staggering result of frenetic bodies in a kind of wild maenad ritual perfectly materializes my distorted memories of those Saturday nights. Going to 515 West 18th Street every weekend became my weekly routine, something I could count on. I went alone or with my friend Pancho, but I hadto go every week without fail. I didn't dance much; I took my drugs and went up to a small room above the entrance, filled with sofas where I would sit for hours alone. Being elevated, I could contemplate the immensity of the dance floor in all its exuberance. I think my photos of bodies were born out of those hours.
And then, there are the miracles. All those levitating men are, to me, Catholic saints. I'm interested in the miracle—not the miraculous. The miracle that canon law certifies, because then it exists. Nothing is fuller of hope than a miracle. I read with complete coherence the blending of Catholic miracles with the activism ofWojnarowicz's photographs of New York. Making the wayward levitate on the Westside Piers seeks to dignify the oppressed. To redefine something as Catholic as a miracle is an attempt to restore dignity through the ultimate subversion of symbols linked to institutional homophobia. But at the same time, it's a deeply personal, intimate portrait of myself; it's my solitary night walks through New York, yearning once again. Desires that were never going to be fulfilled.
But of all the longed-for spaces in New York, the ultimate temple for me was always the Bijou club on 82 East 4th Street in the East Village. I long to return to that place more than to my mother's arms. I discovered the Bijou in the early 2000s as sex gradually became for me an increasingly perfect form of personal alienation, so it was a bit like coming home. Bijou was a kind of subterranean movie theater converted into a sex club, with a screen that continuously projected all kinds of films, often even good ones. The space was surrounded by small booths with a system of codes and protocols much like those of gay saunas.
The longing here becomes almost painful. I was truly happy there. I didn't expect technology could bring me back the dead. It was strange; less therapeutic than I expected. Because in reality, more than therapy, it was more like a séance. AI, the dead, and spirits. The death Roland Barthes speaks of. AI as the natural evolution of that document of death, which for Barthes was a photograph, perverted to the extreme. Or improved.
July 3, 2026
*Contragenics is a word I learned reading The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant, it was coined by linguist Richard J. Deppe to encompass all the minorities that the nazis resolved to eliminate, including the gay community, long forgotten by History."