When Alix Cleo Roubaud died at the age of 31, she left behind a profound and deeply personal body of work exploring self-portraiture, life, illness, the body and death. Helene Giannecchini was the curator tasked with sorting through some six hundred photographs, letters, and other written documents belonging to the artist ahead of a posthumous retrospective held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2014. But she had never met Alix Cleo Roubaud and this absence is felt keenly through her writing as she treads the boundaries between biography and fiction, life and art. Helene Giannecchini pieces together the fragments that remain of this fleeting but dazzling life, spotlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the photographer's ideas on the double, repetition and drawing out the influences of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein on her practice. Just as Alix Cleo Roubaud's art is approached through the notes jotted in her journal, and the material evidence of trial prints and chemical experiments from the darkroom, so too Helene Giannecchini respects the interstices in her account, allowing the blind spots of memory to be. This translation has been occasioned by a new showing of Alix Cleo Roubaud's work alongside that of Francesca Woodman, Shala Miller, Carla Williams and Justine Kurland in a group exhibition curated by Moyra Davey for Galerie Buchholz, New York.

A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed ‘marginal’ into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.

When Alix Cleo Roubaud died at the age of 31, she left behind a profound and deeply personal body of work exploring self-portraiture, life, illness, the body and death. Helene Giannecchini was the curator tasked with sorting through some six hundred photographs, letters, and other written documents belonging to the artist ahead of a posthumous retrospective held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2014. But she had never met Alix Cleo Roubaud and this absence is felt keenly through her writing as she treads the boundaries between biography and fiction, life and art. Helene Giannecchini pieces together the fragments that remain of this fleeting but dazzling life, spotlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the photographer's ideas on the double, repetition and drawing out the influences of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein on her practice. Just as Alix Cleo Roubaud's art is approached through the notes jotted in her journal, and the material evidence of trial prints and chemical experiments from the darkroom, so too Helene Giannecchini respects the interstices in her account, allowing the blind spots of memory to be. This translation has been occasioned by a new showing of Alix Cleo Roubaud's work alongside that of Francesca Woodman, Shala Miller, Carla Williams and Justine Kurland in a group exhibition curated by Moyra Davey for Galerie Buchholz, New York.

A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed ‘marginal’ into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.