Paris

Object Of Desire

The Catsuit

  ‘I like the dark, it’s friendly,’ Irena Dubrovna, the Serbian vamp, says to her thin-moustached American husband in the 1942 horror flick Cat People. He’s asked about her…

Attractions

City X-Ray

  ‘I was in one of the sex chat rooms and accidentally pasted a recipe for how to cook a baby shark in the chat window but caught it…

Long Read Interview

Alice Diop on the Political Nature of Sensuality and Finding Desire Where it isn’t Expected

Over the last decade, Alice Diop has established herself as one of the leading voices in French cinema. Her documentary films include On Call (La permanence, 2016), an immersion…

Attractions

Return Passage

  * * * The Sea in Trance Sometimes, in travel, the memory that really sticks is nothing to do with the place you actually went to. Sometimes…

Portfolio

Margot Wallard

Long Read Interview

Stéphanie D’heygere on the Subversion 
of the Everyday

We sit in the sun, not far from Gare de l’Est in Paris, and watch the crowds pass by. A man with sunglasses dangling under his chin, a choker,…

Attractions

In The Trollbox

When I met the hacker, who we’ll call Brian, he was under house arrest. He’d known the police were after him, but in a tired slip forgot…

Portfolio

Marguerite Bornhauser

Epistolary

The Appropriate

Dear Branwell, I tried to marry every single one of my serious relationships. That first one, my first graduate school boyfriend, was ring shopping when I left him.

Attractions

Memorable Neckwear

*** Friday Pleasure Rooms The sound a washing machine makes is predictable. It has phases. There is the opening hiss, rolls and sloshes, a cacophony, then a…

Attractions

Mixed Advice from the Cosmos

    *** Rebellious and Dreamy ‘Practice holding two opposing ideas in your head today,’ says a push alert on my phone sent by Co-Star, the astrology-powered…

Attractions

Seeing the Sights on Sightseeing the Sightseer

‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people,’ said Isaac Newton, who showed that every particle in the universe is attracted to…

Portfolio

Vincent Ferrané

Portfolio

Allyssa Heuze

Long Read Interview

Carolina Bueno on Brazil’s Throwaway Urbanism and Flirting Across Cultural Divides

Carolina Bueno is an architect and designer from São Paulo, Brazil. Together with her partners she runs Triptyque, a large architectural design office in Paris and São Paulo working…

Tentacular Thinking

Vessels of Others

  1 Mainstream philosophy and science at least since Aristotle have held to the view that each living body, under normal circumstances, should be inhabited by…

Portfolio

Soufiane Ababri

Tentacular Thinking

Saudade: An Echo of the Past in the Future

  Have you ever had the feeling that the old dress you’re wearing, the one you found in your mother’s closet or in a second-hand shop somewhere, is only…

Long Read Interview

Tshegue on the Energetic Sound of the Paris Banlieue

Contrary to stereotypes, Tshegue practices the fusion between afros rhythms, garage rock and electro trance and club-culture production. At high temperature! Tshegue is the name given to the little street…

Long Read Interview

Bertrand Mandico on Metamorphosis, Lovable Monsters, and the Obscure Object of Desire

The short films of French director Bertrand Mandico have long served as a kind of secret handshake among film lovers who yearn for a cinema of unrestrained, shape-shifting desires and…

Long Read Interview

Lucile Hadžihalilovic on Ambivalence, Eroticism, and Ritual

A dark wooden coffin rests in the centre of an elegant room. It’s child-sized, and has an unusual star-shaped window in its lid. A scratchy record plays in the…

Portfolio

Adeline Mai

Portfolio

Camille Vivier

Long Read Interview

Catherine Breillat on Seduction, the Attraction of Violence and Her New Film Abus De Faiblesse

Catherine Breillat’s work as a novelist and filmmaker is often surrounded by controversy and sometimes scandal. In her films she defies normative portrayals of romantic love to unearth erotic…