The Project
Yes, Please! celebrates the erotic imagination and aims to break the taboos surrounding our fantasies and sexuality. To do so, over 300 people were interviewed about their erotic fantasies (in a traveling caravan) and these fantasies were collected in a book that was published by Dutch publisher Bruna in March 2020. The illustrations shown here are the accompanying artwork in the book, which was organized in nine categories of sexual fantasies. Seven of these categories were adapted from work by American sex researcher
Justin Lehmiller, who surveyed over 4,000 people about their sexual fantasies to create a hierarchy of the most common fantasies (as published in the book T
ell Me What You Want, 2018). Categories include, among others, multipartner sex, BDSM and power play, non-monogamy (such as swinging, partner sharing, and polyamory), and taboo and forbidden sex.
These works are a collaboration between
Atelier Cambré and
Project Yes, Please!. Atelier Cambré is a Dutch design studio run by Belgian illustrator
Evelien Cambré (1991). Cambré graduated in Communicational Illustration from Art Academy Minerva (Groningen, 2016) and has been active as an editorial illustrator on a freelance basis ever since. Project
Yes, Please! is an initiative of the Belgian artist
Lucas De Man, Dutch psychologist
Mariëlle de Goede and their team. Together, they have collaborated on the publication of a book and an exhibition about erotic fantasies, both named
Yes, Please!.
Each illustration portrays one category and is accompanied by an audio excerpt from an interview, to illustrate both the creativity of our erotic minds, as well as what the artists concluded is perhaps the biggest taboo of all: the taboo of being vulnerable, of 'exposing' our erotic desires.
These audio excerpts of people sharing their fantasies were also part of the
exhibition on erotic fantasies that was housed in Marres museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands, earlier this year. All participants have formally consented to the sharing of their interviews (anonymously).