Artistic Research
Week 2024

Routes of Desire: Cruising an urban forest as a site of lived queer histories

‘Routes of Desire’ is an expanded-cinema project that adopts ‘cruising’ as a research methodology to reimagine an urban forest as a site of lived queer histories. It explores the Oeverlanden Park’s gay-cruising area in Amsterdam by imagining its trees as living archives of queer existence. The trees become portals of inquiry, of speaking, listening and creating fantasies. While the trees evoke through their own parable potentials of discovery and speculation, the project wanders through a labyrinth of archives and lived histories both encountered and stoked by the forest.

Through the skin and pulp of queer trees in Amsterdam’s forest-reserve, the project delves into deeper inquisitions on ways of looking at our notions of beauty, on the gaze regimes of skin and its colour. Reflecting on what it means for the filmmaker to be a coloured-gay man inside a cruising forest-reserve in a western country, he reminisces on the memories rooting from the image of his grandfather’s leukoderma-ridden face. A face whose brown and white patches appeared to the filmmaker’s childhood gaze as a face with a forest of wondrous flowers and butterflies.

Through its methodologies, the project proposes to expand upon the activity of cruising inside a forest as an exercise to observe, meditate, converse and speculate. Weaving the intrepid complexities of queer desire and an urban forest’s wilderness, it combines analog photography, documentary, archival research and performance practices to reflect upon the traces existing between the intimate and the public, the historical and the poetic, the anthropological and the auto-ethnographic. 

In a constellation of creative outcomes, the project builds towards the production of a film titled ‘Rangi: Sanctuary of Whispering Trees’, a photo book and exhibit titled ‘In Trees, I See’, and a film-based performance titled ‘Tales from a Gedoog Forest’.

Excerpt from Photo Book titled ‘In Trees, I See’
… While I had returned to cruising spaces after years, the positionality of being a filmmaker behind the camera lens posed critical questions on my way forward inside the forest-reserve. In cognizance of the fact that I was not merely a bystander or a curious onlooker interested in finding out what goes on inside gay-cruising areas but someone with a history of cruising, I strived to find sensitised ways of engaging with the space through my lens. To the receptors of my research inquiries, the trees of Oeverlanden’s forest-reserve registered as queer themselves, marked by the peculiarity of their unsown, undaunted history. As witnesses of decades of cruising, they bore testimonies of their own life as well as the lives of the cruisers they had been encountering.

My choice to work with an analog B&W photographic film as a first step into the space brought about creative restraint, so as not to exploit the space with digital imaging and to respect its privacy as much as possible. Furthermore, retaining the intimacy of my interaction with the trees, I decided not to send the negative stock of their naked bodies to a lab for chemical processing and instead chose to hand-develop the film stock with Coffee. Mixing ingredients such as instant coffee powder, detergent and Vitamin C in a beaker bringing the images of naked trees to visible light, felt like a ritual – one that alchemized my physical presence into the trees inside the dark room…