Pour Transformer Votre Vie Passez Une Petite Annonce (To transform your life, place a classified ad)

Born in a tunnel in the Zurich suburbs, this project explores the subterranean realms of desire to reveal their transformative power. Between 2022 and 2025, Vladislav Semenova responded to hundreds of erotic personal ads published in Switzerland. From these correspondences emerged encounters where strangers enacted their deepest fantasies, venturing onto the fragile boundary between impulse and social norms.

At the crossroads of documentary and personal myth, this series unveils a dual theater: that of the models, reenacting their desires, and that of the photographer, confronted with his own inner images. Guided by a psychoanalytic approach, Semenov's poetic and humanist gaze captures the individual in their ultimate moment of intimacy and explores this inner scene that each person invents to tame their impulses.

Behind the eroticism, the project explores a fundamental need: the need to be seen and recognized, in order to access a form of inner peace. Here, Eros becomes the driving force of an elevation, an energy of transcendence that connects desire to consciousness.

The photographs finally engage in dialogue with documents from the archives of the Maurice Chalumeau Centre for Sexual Sciences and the Grisélidis Réal Centre (Aspasie Association, Geneva), inscribing this work in the living memory of Swiss erotic imaginaries.