Now in Unmapping, at Indecis Timișoara
"Love" explores practices for embodying love – hypersensibility, ecstatic affects, subtle affective connections with things around – love in its expanded sense, as the affective base of reality, which, in a mysterious way, sensible bodies can sometimes sense and affect. In Love, the charged sensible bodies are inserted in "inappropriate" contexts where something else is already happening – from art spaces to supermarkets and anything in between. Their sensibility brings a contrast that can performatively interfere with the normality of those contexts, temporary zones of possibility might open. Since affects are contagious, the entire atmosphere and situation can be affected. Artworks are usually visual, sound or conceptual. Love is love based.
Spiritual traditions talk about a fear/control vs love dynamic – we always have the choice between the two sides and everything is decided by that. It might be a simplistic view, but it is surprisingly actual now, when our lives and politics are so much fear and control based. Although "fear" is somehow twisted to mean "love". The twist is possible because "love" is exhausted and perverted, it can mean anything, from sex to empty corporate "care" slogans. What is disappearing from "love" is the actual body experience of it. From everyday actions to art practices, the default perspective is of a body as instrument, as tool. We control and put our bodies to do things, to work, to create images, to express ideas, we discipline and choreograph them, and this pattern of control extends to nature, society and entire reality, with horrible consequences.
Love can dissolve control and instrumentalization, changing bodies and worlds in the process. It can start as a practice of adding an affective sensibility to everyday behaviors, a second attention that might make one drift out of the anatomic body towards a sensible body – 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 explores alternatives to the capitalist body, to the body as machine, which Silvia Federici traces as being the first mechanism (not the clock or the steam engine) that the industrial revolution needed to produce in order for capitalism to take over. Alternatives are needed not only because the control / image body is destroying the world (ecocide, extinction, wars, multiple crises) but because it's also collapsing the possible, greatly diminishing the range of what can be perceived, thought, imagined and experienced. Love is also a process of recuperating the foundations of the possible, the powers of bodies to affect and to be affected. And an inserting and asserting of those bodies into the (art)world, hopefully with some contagious affects and effects.
In some contexts Love appears uninvited - Unofficial Unworks
Performers Eliza Trefas, Martina Piazzi, Florin Flueras.
Love, notes from inside - documentation as text
Related to Love Nature and Love-expanse.
Love (institutions) in Unmapping, Timisoara (2025)
For the Unmapping process and exhibition, Love focuses especially on bureaucratic, administrative, managerial institutions in Timisoara, but also on some art venues, because, let's face it, the difference is getting smaller and smaller.
Love in Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale (2024)
Love in Unofficial Unworks at Gallery Weekend Berlin (2023):
Love in Unofficial Unworks at Berlin Biennale (2022)
Love, in residency at Buda Kortrijk (2023)
Love, in residency at Centrale Fies (2023)
Love, in residency at TFB Berlin 2022, 2023:
Love in the frame of Art Opening at the supermarket, Bucharest, 2021:
Love at the Art Opening Izvor, Bucharest, 2021:
Love in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at Berardo Museum Lisbon, 2020:
Love in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at supermarket, Lisbon 2020:
Love, notes from inside - documentation as text
Related to Love Nature and Love-expanse.