NEXPO and Querformat: Sexkino Roland

Presented by NEXPO, Querformat and gta exhibitions, ETH Zürich.

Kino Roland is closing down. As a sex cinema running for more than 40 years, it has been providing pornographic material until recently, and hereby complementing the array of sexual services at Zürich’s Langstrasse. It has been a mediating institution within the city, one that modulates and regulates the contemporary sexual subject through its semiotic-technical government. Its bricks, neon signs and mural paintings have been in charge of reproducing the biopolitical norm of the heteronormative patriarchy, inducing sexual excitement in the male viewers while unveiling the disobedient nature of sexual desires.

In search of possible venues for the next swiss national exhibition Nexpo, we explore places of change and seek the new in the existing. Driven by the question “How do we live together in the 21st century?”, the collaboration with Querformat begins with the idea that space and sexuality are deeply entangled and intertwined. The void of Sexkino Roland marks a point of change whilst opening itself up for various speculations and potentialities. The former cinema will be put to an investigation. It becomes the starting point for a discussion on how corpo­reality is negotiated in urban and public space.

For one last time, we invite you to inhabit the void of Sexkino Roland with us.

Artworks by Mathilde Agius, Ellen Cantor, Azize Ferizi, Dese Escobar, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Larry Johnson, Monica Majoli, Reba Maybury, La Chola Poblete, Dean Sameshima, Annie Sprinkle, Wu Tsang; installation by Querformat; kiosk by Tatjana Blaser and Madame ETH; merchandise by Mistress Rebecca.

The porn theater delimitates a territory under the exclusive dominion of the male subject. Women are notoriously absent, appearing only on screen or on the mural representations of lesbian intercourse via the male gaze and as pleasure giving devices. This fundamental erasure of womanhood is well illustrated by Audre Lorde, claiming that women’s erotic power is oppressed by the pornographic. The symbolic representations of patriarchal power in heterosexual pleasure have led feminists such as Andrea Dworking to reject pornography as a whole practice, having identified a clear link between extreme sexual violence against women and the consumption of pornography. Other feminist figures identify a radical liberating potential within porn. For Virginie Despentes, “the porn actress is the liberated woman, the femme fatale, the one who turns heads, who always provokes a strong reaction…” While the anti-pornography movement runs the risk of defining the female body as inherently unable to emancipate through porn, Despentes states that “the only moral issue…is the political aggressiveness with which these women are treated offstage.”

Built in 1881, the transformation of Kino Roland into a sex cinema in 1978 takes place in an already developed pharmacopornographic capitalism, as posited by Paul B. Preciado. It has been one of the visible architectural devices of the pharmacopornographic regime within public space. Its closing down might just signify a broader retreat of porn consumption to the domestic and the digital space. Pornhub, XVideos and Only Fans have transformed every bedroom into a sex cinema and every inhabitant into a potential porn actress/actor.

However, what happens in the dark room might have been more complex than watching and wanking. Random encounters between men seeking for pleasure emerged out of the must of sharing a physical space to watch porn. Samuel Delany has written about his crusing experiences as a black homosexual man in the sex cinemas along the 42nd street in New York, just before they were demolished as a result of the Times Square’s zoning plan. Those spaces have fostered cross-class and mixed-race social contacts in the shape of aromantic intimacy. The complex social network around them has stabilized different communities while maintaining their heterogeneity. Four years after the book was published, the newspaper “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” reported eight male immigrant sex workers being arrested for providing sex services in Walche, another Sexkino in Zürich run by the company that operates Roland.

It might not be coincidental that the closing down of Sexkino Roland overlaps with a broader, ongoing process of gentrification at work in Langstrasse. Among the sex cinemas in Zürich, “Stüssihof” has already been converted into a children’s cinema in 2014, while “Sternen Oerlikon” has become a gastronomy venue, imagined as a meeting place for “the local community”. Gentrification goes hand in hand with the disappearance of sex in public spaces. The transgressive character of porn mentioned above is directly at odds with the process of urban homogenization. As the collective “Dangerous Bedfellows” states, The battle over public sex is “also about real estate and big business”. As they pointed out, “restricting sexual expression in public space is about artificially inflating property values, “gentrifying” certain neighbourhoods while turning others into commercial dumping grounds, and destroying the sexual culture that residents and tourists have built—and governments have fought—for decades.” When gentrification arrives, sexual and uncomfortable contents are replaced by family-friendly entertainment. The foundations of the pharmacopornographic regime have to remain underground, either in the urban or in the cybernetic depths.

The closing down of Kino Roland and the current state of abandonment of the building opens at the same time a void within the public space of the city. Being no longer a potential cruising interior, nor a physical place which supports the biopolitics of the pharmacopornographic society, it leaves a void full of potentiality, ready to be inhabited one last time.

A few years ago, Paul B. Preciado pronounced a speech in front of the “Ecole de la Cause Freudienne”, announcing a “period of unprecedented historic importance”, one in which “the epistemology of sex, gender and sexual difference is mutating”. Sexkino Roland could be a mark of a collapsing epistemology, and the building could mutate alongside it, thus marking the passage from sex, gender and sexual difference to an endless number of differences of bodies, of unidentified and unidentifiable desires.

Curatorial concept written by Juan Barcia Mas and Shen He, in conversation with Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, Reba Maybury and Nikola Nikolov.

Program

Opening
Inclusive Monuments? Preservation of Sex Cinemas: October 15, 6–7:30pm
Talk by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (EPFL) and Silke Langenberg (ETH Zürich)
Dispositivo de Saturación Sexual: October 15, 8–9:30pm
Performance by Candela Capitán

Faster Than an Erection: October 21, 6–8pm
Talk by Reba Maybury and Cassandra Troyan

Samuel Delany’s Porn Worlds: October 22, 6–8pm
Talk by Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University) and Samuel Delany

Talk by Monica Majoli: October 28, 6–8pm

CYBORG MANIFESTO_2: October 28, 8–9pm
Performance by mercedes_666

Leaving the Movie Theater: October 29, 6–8pm
Talk by Damon R. Young (UC Berkeley)

Closing Talk: Kino Roland Barthes: November 3, 6–8pm 
Talk by Bruce Hainley (Rice University)

NEXPO
info [​at​] nexpo.ch / T +41 79 695 16 35 
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Querformat
querformat [​at​] arch.ethz.ch 

Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 6–10pm