Christophe Van Eecke is an independent filmmaker and a photographer. He is Visiting Professor at LUCA School of Arts. He is the author of Pandaemonium: Ken Russell's Artist Biographies as Baroque Performance (2015), which was awarded the Research Prize of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, and of Only Connect: Five Exercises in Aesthetics (2011).

 

The three main galleries on this website offer selections from larger book projects.

 

Tare is the result of an autoethnographic research project documenting the memory of a gay cruising area. Often located in city parks or along the highway, a gay cruising area seems like a parallel universe, a no man’s land of infinite desire. Over a period of several years, I documented the lay of the land at a well-known cruising spot through the seasons and the times of day, mapping the terrain and its memories with photographs and texts (made on an iPhone3).

 

Chaussée is the intersection of two projects. It takes its title from a series of photographs made while driving along the chaussée d’amour, the red-light district near where I live. The second project consists of several series of photographs created while driving along major roads on my way home from work abroad or on holidays. As such, all images in this collection document a kind of no-man’s-land, the spaces between destinations, and the places where people make furtive stopovers for sexual encounters hidden away from the eyes of the world (an obvious connection to Tare). All images were made on an iPhone3.

 

The Lost Mauve collection is a visual notebook where I have assembled thematically connected images over a period of many years. Both Tare and Chaussée were initially part of this collection, but they outgrew it. Lost Mauve started its public life several years ago as a photoblog. It was completed when my iPhone3 gave up the ghost, bringing work on these three collections to a natural end.

 

The book of Tare (2019) can be freely accessed here:

https://petroniuscentaur.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/tare-theatres-of-lust.pdf

The book of Chaussée (2020) can be freely accessed here:

https://petroniuscentaur.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/chaussee-districts-of-desire.pdf

The book of Lost Mauve (2021), offering much of a muchness, can be freely accessed here:

https://petroniuscentaur.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/lost-mauve-with-olympian-bagatelles-1.pdf