City Lab 3.0: Then, there & them

As part of Luxembourg Pride Week (2–11 July), the Lëtzebuerg City Museum, in collaboration with the Rainbow Center, presents an installation exploring the theme of queerness. The exhibited project, entitled Then, There & Them, is the outcome of an group of artists led by the artist Leire de Meer.

At the heart of the installation is the staging of a picnic: the remains of a meal are scattered across a blanket. Masks hang from the ceiling, and a large cookbook resting on a table invites visitors to open it. A group of queer people has disguised themselves in order to venture into the world and unsettle it. What is revealed when we hide our faces? Here, queer bodies resist a totalizing gaze that seeks to categorize them.

The project's title is inspired by the concept of queerness developed by the theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who understood it as an attempt to imagine a future beyond the hardships of the present—a possible "then" and "there." "Them," meanwhile, refers to the queer community, playing on the English gender-neutral pronoun, which can be used in both the singular and the plural.

The installation is presented within the City Lab space of the exhibition City Visions, an experimental format shaped each time by a different community of city residents. Here, the museum moves away from its traditional role as a single authoritative narrator and instead assumes the role of a facilitator, allowing communities to define their own terms, tell their own stories, and develop their own forms of expression.