COMM.
2026
do you want me to come? explores London’s traditional cruising grounds: Hampstead Heath, Abney Park Cemetery, Battersea Park, Hackney Marshes and Vauxhall. These places have sheltered the gay community since Victorian times. They have been sites of revolution and subversion as well as pleasure, and they survived the heavy policing of the 1980s. Photographed between 2015 and 2023, the project asks whether they are still vessels for social change or have become something else.
The work looks at these spaces with a clinical yet neutral eye. Paths through the undergrowth, overgrown graves, empty benches and figures walking away from the camera are repeated, enlarged and blurred. Translucent pages lay images over one another, so they appear and fade the way they do in the park. Drawing on the silent language of cruising (glances, gestures, waiting), the book builds a new visual language for places that are otherwise invisible.
Alongside the photographs, an essay traces the park from royal hunting ground to the democratic space it became, through Foucault’s ideas of surveillance, transparency and darkness, to the cruising ground as heterotopia.
Project, photography and texts by Sebastian Abugattas
Designed by Studio Wan
Printed on Taiwan V-lite and Taiwan Translucent White
by Jimmy Wonderland, Hong Kong
Typeset in Neue Haas Unica
Clear cover with elastic closure
180 × 234 mm
Self-published, limited edition of 100 copies
2015-2025
Through these cruising spots, I have learned so much about my community's rich history and the challenges we have faced. Including the chance to explore the places where people gathered since Victorian times, the parks that got the worst of policing and social changes in the 1980s, and how, despite all the odds, these spaces have always flourished.
Drawing inspiration from Antonioni’s Blow-up – the act of magnifying places and images is a constant theme that I revisit and reconsider – I approach these spaces with a clinical yet neutral lens. Through my work, I see photography as a powerful tool to challenge the existing social structures, both in public and private spaces.
I am particularly interested in developing a new visual language that captures these otherwise invisible places and preserves them from fading away. This new way of seeing originates from the silence often found in the cruising experience. It draws from a unique form of nonverbal communication, rich with gestures, glances, and body language. This leads to what I would call the new semiotics of cruising, which invites a more profound reflection on photography and its boundaries.
2016
I have been exploring the flux between the city as an organism and nature's attempts to coexist with it.
Soul is a project that deals with how nature tries to make a space for itself inside the city, specifically in Seoul's constant metropolitan expansion. This project also explores the duality of South Korean society: extraordinarily modern but very traditional, with ancestral costumes rooted in the collective imaginary.
Analog to this, the same duality is reflected in the relationship that exists between the metropolis and nature. In a city that tries to find a place for the natural in a completely artificial context. In the same way, it is a society that looks to the future from the traditional.
In the end, a question remains: Is nature fighting back, or are we getting to a place where we are fighting for her?