Florin Flueras

Art Opening 9 (repose, falling asleep, peace)

December 11, 17h at Somn Bucharest.

📷 Florin Flueras, Artwork (2023)

Art Opening invites you to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. The event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, intervention, or more likely, a mix of them.

In a world in which everything fights increasingly harder for our exhausted attention, art constantly “needs to be” more “stimulating” and “engaging”. The closer they look like parties, the more “interesting” art events seem to be. Boring, low or dead times are avoided at all costs. Art Opening 9 is a space and time for allowing ourselves to be at ease with being bored or even falling asleep. At Somn it will be fully possible and desirable to sleep on ourselves while presenting or attending.

If Stilinović was right, and I think he was, that “there is no art without laziness”, that art and labor are opposites, and creativity fully depends on having free, idle time for just lying around, the (art)world is in a very bad spot. Art looks more and more like “projects” and “production”, like everything else. There is a total alignment of art with work, and with the production society. “Inspiration”, “creativity”, “insight” are almost impossible, and that's why they are frowned upon. The frenzy of productivity leaves no space, time and disposition to meditate on implicit frames, perspectives and certitudes, and eventually exit them.

The production society is based on an intensive exploitation and exhaustion of nature, and of ourselves. Being at the point of terminating its natural base, the hyper active society “grows” more and more towards militarism, wars and necropolitics, towards the management of life and especially towards the administration of death. To have any hope of exiting the perspectives and practices that are currently dismantling the world and ourselves – the spiral of “development and progress” towards doom – we need to reclaim some free, boring, death time for laziness, for lying around, sleeping, dreaming. Not only in art but at the level of society, a move towards inaction, rest, peace is needed. It would also be great if someone or something put our production society to sleep.

Art Opening 9 is also self-referential by taking place in a venue that proposes sleep as a possible response to the production society and its imperatives – “Somn (sleep) is an art space for deep and relaxed departures, for falling asleep to artworld’s commercial, ideological, and spectacle imperatives”. Explicit and implicit limitations determine what kind of art is possible. In non-commercial, state funded art contexts, artists are more and more rewarded for conformism to pre-established themes and perspectives, for interiorizing institutional mindsets. This, together with the entire administrative bureaucracy around a project, can easily exhaust any art drive. The given alternative would be to embrace a commercial mindset, to do sellable objects, images, spectacle – to follow and interiorize art trends, trying to catch some art world waves. This may be an equally effective way to kill your passion. Even speaking of artistic drive, desire or passion might sound off, because a dry professionalization seems to be the implicit normality. In this art closure atmosphere, Art Opening 9 aims to sleep through all that, and eventually dream some temporary zones of possibility and openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics.

It's very strange how, with only a concept and a text, without much curating, organizing or scheduling, the evening was, as the previous Art Openings, very interesting in terms of content, dynamics and atmosphere. I wouldn't say that we got 9th time lucky. I think there is a value in renouncing control and letting things to arrange by themselves and people to self-organize.

Many thanks to the artists and visitors.
Artists: Alina Popa, Giles Eldridge, Eliza Trefas, Anticorp Solar, Adelina Moisoiu, Kira Valentina, Sibi Teodorescu, Victor Podeanu, Smaranda Găbudeanu, Florin Flueras.

Previous Art Openings

Unmapping

If mapping means bringing a place into the realm of the known, the stable, and the predictable, Unmapping introduces deviations, dérives, exceptions, suspensions, situations that temporarily remove certain zones (public spaces and institutions) from the ordinary, the everyday, the familiar, from their implicit mapping. Spaces for reflection, unfamiliarity, unknowing, openings for new possibilities – unmapped zones might appear.

Unmapping practices are inserted as subtle interventions in the social, aesthetic, and affective textures of places and, in a self-referential way, also in the Unmapping process itself, through deviations from the usual ways of collaborating, working, and presenting. Unmapping proposes a collaboration based on productive alienations – artists are amplified in their own paths, in the proximity and with the support of others, producing unpredictable interactions between different processes and practices. Over the exhibition context, the process will continue in Indecis space but also in the city, the exhibition changing and evolving along the way and is accompanied by performances and interventions. You can join the artists and the Unmapping process at Indecis during the entire duration of the exhibition.

We are Sleepers: Eliza Trefas, Traian Chereches, Diego Agulló, Smaranda Gabudeanu, Martina Piazzi, Vlad Brăteanu, Florin Flueras. We have some common interests like questioning and avoiding artworld’s commercial, ideological, managerial and entertainment imperatives; exploring relations between environmental collapse, spirituality and the current implicit certainties and realities, and their enforcement in art. Through Unmapping we don't plan to harmonize our perspectives, but to allow ourselves to productively diverge, accepting and amplifying each other's perspectives.

From what I gathered until now (a few days before the opening), Traian is scratching the artworld's immaculate surface, unearthing and recycling discarded artworks accumulated in the hidden premises of an important art venue in the city. Starting from our question about why he currently finds Tai Chi more fulfilling and meaningful than art, Diego does a peculiar version of Tai Chi (employing a pizza roller) in different contexts in the city. During the exhibition, he will do Tai Chi sessions with artists, trying to make them quit art. Eliza is doing advice meetings around strange meals (food sprinkled with ashes made of texts like “A Hunger Artist “, cakes made of soil gathered from the heroes cemetery, cotton balls soaked in vitamins…), starting from her process of perceiving the city and life in general through a hunger that wants to become aesthetic. Smaranda is exploring body adaptations to postapocalyptic scenarios in the city, although it became apparent that Bucharest might be more adequate for this practice. Martina aims to reach others through audio suggestions that can influence their bodies and behaviors in the exhibition and then in the city. Vlad is doing a secret project involving the city's numerous natural and mineral water public fountains. He's also looking to revisit a clandestine monumental work that he managed to install in the city 3 years ago. As for myself. I'm still interested in the capacity of the body to affect and to be affected. I introduce the affect charged bodies (mine and Eliza's) in bureaucratic, administrative, managerial institutions in Timișoara, but also in some art venues, because, let's face it, the difference is getting smaller and smaller.

A Sleepers’ project, initiated by Florin Flueras, produced by PETEC, financed by Centrul de Proiecte Timișoara, supported by Minitremu, Indecis and SOMN.

Love-expanse (2025)

Next: on October 2, 19h, in Rehearsal for an Institution of Performance at /Teatre Bucharest.

Love-expanse is an expansion of the body's sensibility and its power to affect and to be affected – an expansion of Love (2018). 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, sorcery. Love-expanse negotiates a path between these contexts for spiritual experiences, 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.

Love as Unofficial Unwork at Berlin Biennale 2022

Love-expanse in Institution of Performance at Casa Tranzit Cluj (2025 ). (It was particularly pleasant to go through some Muslim prayers in the former synagogue.)

📷 Răzvan Anton, Eliza Trefas.

Documentation as text – notes from inside

Love Nature (2024)

Love (2018) explores practices for embodying love by activating a hypersensibility and an affect based way of being – aiming a reverse of the control perspective that, with horrible consequences, extends from instrumentalizing the body to nature and the entire reality. Love Nature is an expansion of Love, centered on affecting and being affected by plants. There are some puzzling experiments showing that plants feel when someone has the intention to harm them, pointing to a sensibility that we might share with other beings, and with nature in general. In times of mass extinction, when more than 200 species disappear every day, it feels urgent to activate this sensibility and expand it to an embodied love, because nothing else seems to stop us from destroying everything. We might take care of nature more out of love, because we feel to, rather than because "we have to".

In our globalized culture, it's more and more difficult and ridiculous to communicate with plants, fungi, animals and other beings. Beings become more and more on the side of objects than subjects. We tend to see ourselves and nature as complex matter organized according to the physical laws. Through this perspective everything is objectivized, to be analyzed, exploited and consumed. Even current ecology is more and more about planning ways to instrumentalize and engineer nature, in order to “save it”. Love Nature dissolves control and instrumentalization, changing bodies and worlds in the process – from "image body" to body as a portal towards the unknown, to "love body". We don't know what a love body can do.
Love Nature takes the form of performance-workshops in which the Love Nature sensibility is activated in our bodies, bodies that then are re-inserted in communities doing their everyday, “normal” activities, but with a Love Nature extra layer. This sensibility might appear exaggerated, strange, abnormal, puzzling. The contrast that this hypersensibility brings might performatively interfere with the normality of those contexts, expanding their possibilities and limits, at least temporarily. Because affects are contagious, Love Nature can spread. Artworks are usually visual, sound or conceptual. Love Nature is affect based.

Notes from inside Love Nature - documentation as text

Related to Love and Love-expanse.

Love Nature in Refuge exhibition at Sapieha Palace Vilnius (2024)