Exhibition: Nice Queer traces the history of LGBTQIA+ communities in Nice

The “Nice Queer” exhibition, installed at the 109, highlights decades of struggles, creations and LGBTQIA+ lives. It invites the public to discover often invisible memory, through archives, testimonies and artistic works.

Presented at the 109, the exhibition “Nice Queer: a history to be written” traces the history of LGBTQIA+ communities on the Côte d’Azur. Organized for the occasion of the 18th edition of In&Out Nice Queer Film Festival, it is carried by the associations Missing Memory: LGBTQIA+ archives from the Azur coast and Les Ouvreurs.

Free and open until May 3rd, the exhibition presents itself as a great collective exploration of Nice’s queer memory. Installed in the former site of the city’s slaughterhouses (now transformed into a contemporary cultures hub), it relies on archive documents, images, narratives and objects to tell a still little-documented history.

A long invisible memory

For a long time, the history of LGBTQIA+ people in Nice remained scattered between individual memories, associative archives and cultural traces. The exhibition seeks precisely to bring these fragments together to build a common narrative.

In the Grand Hall of the 109, the tour is organized around several major themes: artistic creation and cultural events, associative life and activist spaces, as well as health and the fight against HIV/AIDS. Places of sociability and the community’s nightlife are also part of this historical mapping.

Through these sections, visitors can discover how queer communities shaped spaces of solidarity, visibility and creation in the city. The exhibition thus highlights activist journeys, local figures and key moments in Nice’s cultural life.

A participatory exhibition

Nice Queer is also intended to be a living project. The exhibition was designed in an interactive way to encourage public participation and the enrichment of the archives.

Visitors can discover testimonies, works or rarely shown documents, but also contribute to this collective memory. The objective is clear: continue to write Nice’s queer history, by bringing together the voices and experiences of those who shaped it.