ESPACE MVG presents COCAINELOVE : Une histoire d’amour au cœur de l’addiction, an exhibition by Michael von Graffenried.
For two years, Astrid and Pierre openly offered themselves to Michael von Graffenried’s panoramic gaze, from love to dependence. This long-running series develops an intimate approach to their story, attentive to gestures, bonds, and vulnerabilities, giving a human face to a reality often marginalized and questioning its place in the public sphere.
In 1987, while photographing the world’s first supervised consumption room in Bern for the harm-reduction organization Réseau Contact, Michael von Graffenried began to weave the bonds of trust that would anchor COCAINELOVE at the heart of a public-health crisis marked by HIV, overdoses, and the open drug scenes of the Platzspitz (“Needle Park”) in Zurich.
It was in this context that Graffenried met Astrid and Pierre: a young couple bound by love as much as by addiction. For eighteen months, he followed them through tenderness and violence, incarceration, relapses, and survival. He recorded their relationship at eye level, revealing not spectacle but proximity. Astrid died of an overdose in 2008. She was thirty-six. Pierre was stabbed to death by a friend-dealer in 2018.
In 2005, rather than presenting this work in a museum, Graffenried installed thirty large panoramas on public billboards across Switzerland before bringing them together at the then-Platzspitz. Returning these images to the street was an act of visibility and responsibility: Astrid and Pierre had agreed to show their faces, their names, and their story. The series was later shown in his retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2010.
At a time when in France contemporary policies increasingly tend to criminalize drug use rather than treat it as a public-health issue, COCAINELOVE remains disarmingly timely. While the pioneering harm-reduction policies implemented in Switzerland at the end of the 1980s and 1990s (from supervised consumption rooms to large-scale substitution programs, all the way to medically prescribed heroin treatments) have become international references, the debate remains lively in France, where the first supervised consumption room opened only in 2016.
Revisiting this series today means making visible what society preferred not to see. It is not only a portrait of a couple, but also a way of understanding questions that are still urgent: care, public policy, and the humanity of those who live on the margins. COCAINELOVE is a living archive. Twenty years later, it still speaks.
Curator: Natasha Guy
Michael von Graffenried : COCAINELOVE : Une histoire d’amour au cœur de l’addiction
January 22 – March 28, 2026
ESPACE MVG
36 Rue Falguière
75015 Paris
www.espacemvg.com
