Maison Suzanne

Following the Prix Zervos-Bourgogne and the 2 month residency in Maison Zervos in summer 2013, I initiated the Maison Suzanne project.

This project is an extension, in an exhibition version, of the performance "I built a house on three octaves" inspired by the book Casa Susanna published in 2005 in the United States (Michel Hurst and Robert Swope, PowerHouse Books Edition).

This book collects more than a hundred photographs still representing the same group of people meeting every weekend from 1959 to 1964 in a house called Casa Susanna, located in the rural area of ​​Catskills (New York state). The protagonists are men dressed up as women and transgender women who meet every weekend to live freely away from a conservative society.

This house offers its guests the privacy they need at a time when public disguise was a criminal offense. In the 1950s and 1960s, the sexuality of americans faced a very homophobic Puritan legal system. The photographs of Casa Suzanna were taken in this conservative, repressive and moralizing context

In the book, apart from the photographs, there is no information on the identity of the protagonists and what they were doing. The exhibition gather several installations, collages, draxs and photgraphies : it aims at reinventing this story, their everyday lives et create once again the dreamed place of Casa Susanna