(work in progress)
Love-expanse is an expansion of the hypersensibility of the body and its power to affect and to be affected – an expansion of Love. It is the second branch that grows out of Love, after Love Nature. They are both organic developments: love amplifies and it's amplified by nature, and in certain conditions love has the tendency to expand, to go ecstatic, divine. Love-expanse is an exploration of experiences that bodies in these expanded states are capable of. We really don't know what love-bodies can do.
The expansion of love can push the body in experiential zones that intersect with religion, spirituality, mysticism, shamanism, sorcery. Love-expanse negotiates a path between these contexts that made spiritual experiences possible, contexts that are on their way out, “debunked” and “deconstructed” by modernity, and contexts of contemporary art, where usually these things are in quotation marks, and mostly at a distance.
To approach these experiential zones through art seems taboo and totally uncool. When it's being done it is mostly to criticize, debunk, make fun of, or, in the best case, to approach such experiences ethnographically. It might be ok to “research spiritual practices” from other places and times that cannot affect contemporary subjectivities anymore. What seems less possible is to really have contemporary, embodied explorations of these expanded experiences, explorations that can really challenge our implicit certainties. Yet, if religions seem to be at odds with contemporary subjectivities, can it be possible and desirable to insist on approaching these experiences through art?
We all have our transcendental structures, our implicit beliefs, certainties that frame and determine what is possible to perceive, think, feel and do – we are religious even if we don't want to. In our culture these certitudes are very likely to be materialism, scientism, centrality of work, economy, technology, progress. We can also say that the resulting contemporary “religion” is very destructive, producing the current crises, wars, ecocides. There are also more and more people who feel that “the system” / “the machine” / “modernity” is also dismantling their cores, their humanity, rendering their bodies and minds increasingly “efficient”, economically oriented, one-dimensional, robotic and AI-like. Love-expanse can affect these processes, acting within, against or above implicit and explicit religions.
Documentation as text – notes from inside
Related to Love and Love Nature.
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| Love as Unofficial Unwork at Berlin Biennale 2022 |