Vassilia Kaga | Cruising Manifesto

“Cruising Manifesto” is a curatorial research project exploring the intersection of gay cruising culture and the gentrification of Pedion tou Areos in Athens.

Cruising—seeking queer intimacy in public spaces—was both a necessity and a form of resistance.

Pedion tou Areos, historically one of Athens’ most notable cruising areas, has undergone significant urban transformations due to gentrification and shifting social dynamics.

As economic and political forces reshape the city, former queer meeting points become increasingly surveilled, erased, or co-opted by commercial interests. This curatorial research project aims to map and archive the fading traces of queer sociality, while also questioning the broader impact of urban redevelopment on marginalized communities.

Inspired by Alex Espinoza’s “Cruising” and José Esteban Muñoz’s “Cruising Utopia,” Kaga wants to examine how cruising sites function as both spaces of pleasure and resistance—fluid, ephemeral environments where queer bodies reclaim public space.

Also, the notion of failure as resistance in Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure” is crucial here: cruising, long dismissed as deviant or marginal, is reframed as a mode of non-normative survival, a way of existing outside dominant structures of respectability and assimilation.

With access to the archives of AMPHI magazine, Paola’s ‘Kraximo,’ and other underground queer publications, Kaga will trace the media and subcultural documentation of cruising in Athens, looking at how these spaces were recorded and celebrated. These historical materials will be brought into dialogue with oral histories, site visits, and urban analysis, creating a multi-layered understanding of how queer presence remains in spaces of displacement, where desire once flourished in secrecy and now faces increasing invisibility.

Kaga would like to imprint their research in a poetic hybrid short documentary, merging archival footage, interviews, and the narration of their own “Cruising Manifesto.”

Through ethnography, moving image, and artistic intervention, the project reimagines queer history not as a static past but as an ongoing, embodied present, revealing the ephemeral and ever-evolving nature of queer memory.