Opening on Thursday, November 12, from 6 pm to 9 pm.
from November 13th to 15th : 2 pm-7pm
The Silent Watchers
The Silent Watchers
"Within the walls of La Louisiane, time holds the imprint of passing bodies and the memory of creative insomnias. From Beat Generation manuscripts to Miles Davis solos, this hotel on Rue de Seine has long served as a haven for insubordinate spirits — a true Parisian counterpart to the Chelsea Hotel, where the margins stand as a territory of survival.
For Photo Saint-Germain, nine rooms open their doors to fictions of the shadows. The exhibition metamorphoses the hotel into a liberated territory — a poetic refuge where desire, the night, and the refusal of norms engage in dialogue.
Through photographs and films created by nine artists from the 1960s to the present day, the works reveal the radiance of subcultures, kept secrets, and stolen fragments of life. Interweaving intimate archives and contemporary visions, the exhibition restores substance to forgotten trajectories and clandestine lives. The room ceases to be a simple shelter, becoming instead a sanctuary of vulnerability and the geographies of the intimate."
Martha Kirszenbaum
Tom Wood
From 1979 to 1986, Tom Wood immersed himself in the nocturnal world of the Chelsea Reach club near Liverpool. His intimate photographs capture the effervescence of bodies on the dance floor as much as the suspension of silences: desires on hold, fleeting gestures, the tenderness and loneliness of the end of the night. Presented at La Louisiane, these previously unseen archives reveal the rituals of an unruly, festive youth, transforming a place of passage into a territory inhabited by its most beautiful shadows.
Chantal Akerman
In her 1972 film Hotel Monterey, Chantal Akerman probes urban loneliness through the silent wandering of her camera in a New York hotel. From the lobby to the roof, fluorescent corridors, elevators and spectral figures form a poetic meditation on waiting and anonymity. Echoing La Louisiane, the film transforms a place of temporary shelter into a haunted territory where time stretches, revealing the melancholic beauty of clandestine lives and invisible presences. Restored in 2013 by the Royal Belgian Film Archive – CINEMATEK, under the supervision of Chantal Akerman.
Alassan Diawara
In Les Candidates, Alassan Diawara reactivates an archive recorded during a West African diaspora beauty pageant in Belgium. Far from the spectacle, his gaze lingers on bodies, attitudes, moments of waiting and what their presence produces in space. There, the women stage themselves on their own terms: diasporic figures who, on the margins of dominant gazes, invent their own visibility and turn memory into an act of poetic resistance.
Tohé Commaret
At the crossroads of experimental cinema and documentary, Tohé Commaret films places of transit where the intimate and the political blur together. In Rosa, a red puddle opens and closes the film, a threshold between life and death. An impersonal banquet hall and unsettling topographies bear the spectral imprint of history and the anguish of belonging nowhere. Between image and sound, fluid memories and identities unfold: in these liminal, suspended spaces, women's desire and interiority find a refuge to exist.
Linda Zhengová
Grounding her research in sexual and spiritual transformations, Linda Zhengová explores places where reason collapses. Orbiting the eroticisms of the body, the heart and the sacred so dear to Bataille, she sees madness not as a pathology but as a gateway to freedom. Her images capture the aura of a self dissolving between ecstasy and hell. The room then becomes a psychic sanctuary, an intimate cartography oscillating between transcendence and empathy.
Jill Westwood
A radical figure of the London underground scenes of the 1980s, Jill Westwood explores art as a territory of liberated living. In the intimacy of the domestic setting, her self-portraits and scenes of power stage a dominant femininity, dressed in latex and armed with a sovereign gaze. Subversive and theatrical, her works question desire, BDSM dynamics and the reappropriation of bodies. Here, the bedroom becomes the secret theater where vulnerability is inverted and an erotics of refusal is invented.
Karol Radziszewski
Mixing Polaroids, phone snapshots and intimate archives, Karol Radziszewski documents the encounters and parties that pass through his Warsaw apartment. Whether friends, lovers or models, the people photographed blur the nature of their relationships and dissolve the boundary between the intimate and the public. By reconstituting this domestic space at La Louisiane, the work embraces the ambivalence of the hotel: a transitory hideaway where the memory of queer, unruly lives still vibrates.
Michella Bredahl
Between vulnerability and compassion, Michella Bredahl captures the raw intimacy of her loved ones in unvarnished moments. Extending a family thread marked by the shadow of addiction, her portraits reinvent femininity as a fluid and plural experience. By reversing the reclining pose, a historical motif she reclaims, the artist turns the memory of suffering into a space of reclamation. Bodies reveal themselves as accomplices, offering a nest of tenderness and resilience.
Michel Auder
A privileged witness to New York's underground scene from 1969 onwards, Michel Auder captured life at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was then living with the actress Superstar Viva. Through intimate video fragments, his film paints a raw portrait of Andy Warhol and his creative menagerie. Echoing the legendary hotel, the work resonates here with the memory of La Louisiane: two twin havens where artistic margins, sleepless nights and the art of clandestine living become a territory of absolute freedom.
Hôtel La Louisiane
Amid a haven of chaos, freedom, wild and yet precious chatter, the Hôtel La Louisiane built its identity at 60 rue de Seine, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Since the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine, artists, creators, and travelers in search of wonder have stayed there, whether for a brief visit or a longer residency - among those who once lived there: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco, Lucian Freud, Albertine Sarrazin, Syd Barrett, Keith Haring, Quentin Tarantino, and other contemporary figures to whom the Hôtel La Louisiane owes its discretion.
