Caught in the throat by financial worries and cornered by property developers, rue Quincampoix lesbian bar Le Troisième Lieu was forced to close its doors in 2012, after months of resistance. Nearly a decade later, the La La Lande gallery opened on the same street, just a stone's throw from the defunct bar.
Now occupied by artist Aïcha Snoussi, the gallery becomes a memorial to sunken party nights, an attempt to excavate queer lineages. The remnants of the party are transformed into offerings, and the bottles emptied of their liqueurs are filled with love letters that nobody can decipher any more. Arcade terminals, exhausted by repeated assaults, sigh: "take, one night of my nights of love, one night of my bitter nights". By dint of these invocations, the portrait of the singer Abdel Halim Hafez blends into the features of Leïla, the artist's grandmother. Multiplied, this shifting, androgynous figure creates a new genealogy, an invitation to reinvest in a collective past.
A bar is built in the basement, around a foosball table whose figures mutate, sketching out their future as dildos. This interstitial space is imagined by the artist as a tribute to all the clandestine bars where queer communities were able to meet up, hide away and better express themselves. Between the former cellar of Le Troisième Lieu and the gallery's cellar, the stones communicate and still resonate from those nights of partying and desire between girls.
