Alba Cros | Dyke Tides: Tracing Desires

“Dyke Tides: Tracing Desires” is a poetic, research-based artistic project that explores lesbian cruising in Southern Europe, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean as a space of fluid intimacy and collective imagination. While cruising is often linked to urban gay male sexual cultures—especially in Anglo-American contexts—this project reclaims the verb to cruise as a broader practice of encounter: one that encompasses desire, yes, but also emotional intimacy, touch, recognition, and fleeting gestures between strangers. The project departs from the dominant imaginary of cruising shaped by urban gay male cultures and US-centric aesthetics. It seeks to trace a different, Mediterranean grammar of desire—southern, fluid, collective. What gestures and codes emerge when we center queer women, lesbians, and gender dissidents? What if cruising also includes the intimacy of an embrace, the vulnerability of a conversation, or the silent complicity of being seen?
This research began in Barcelona, mapping current lesbian cruising dynamics while revisiting artistic genealogies—from the feminist post-porn movement of the 2000s to the work of artists such as Carmela García or Cabello/Carceller, who have explored queer intimacy, utopia, and the politics of representation. These references open up questions around how to film desire without reproducing voyeurism: how to make the camera itself a tool of cruising, of relation, of touch.

“Dyke Tides” now expands towards Greece. In both Athens and the island of Lesvos—particularly in the village of Eresos, historically charged with lesbian imaginaries—the project will explore how space, memory, and encounter shape non-linear geographies of intimacy. Urban textures and island landscapes will be approached as living archives: what has been whispered here before? What might still be possible?
Community-driven and open-ended, the research will unfold through interviews, site-specific observations, affective listening, and participatory exchanges with local and visiting lesbians and queer people. It aims to gather fragments of desire, memory, and recognition, resisting heteronormative narratives and affirming other ways of relating. Rather than producing a fixed result, “Dyke Tides” will take shape as an impressionistic filmic collage—a porous and fragmentary visual piece composed of textures, silences, voices, and gestures. A tactile way of holding space for cruising not only as pleasure, but as tenderness, care, and resistance. A way of imagining together how we desire, how we meet, and how we remember.