April 12-14 at Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius.
"Love" explores practices for embodying love – hypersensibility, ecstatic affects, subtle affective connections with things around… The charged love 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 influenced. Artworks are usually visual, sound or conceptual. Love is affect based.
Love is based on Love Body (Second Body) practice of adding an affective sensibility to everyday behaviors, a second attention that might make one drift out of the anatomic body towards a love body. One simple way to activate it is via 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’s kind of urgent to reactivate 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".
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 contemporary dance and performance, 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. Even current ecology is more and more about planning ways to instrumentalize and engineer nature, in order to “save it”. Love dissolves control by going beyond instrumentalization, hopefully changing our 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.
In some contexts Love appears uninvited - Unofficial Unworks
Performers Eliza Trefas, Martina Piazzi, Florin Flueras.
Love, notes from inside - documentation as text
Love in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at Gallery Weekend Berlin (2023):
Love in the frame of 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