Love-expanse

(in Cluj, Bucharest, Timisoara)

Oct 20, 2025

“The imposing, if not sacred atmosphere of the synagogue is combined with sadness about Gaza. I don’t know if it’s “ok” to think that, or at least to write it down. I guess a place for prayer and contemplation is one of the most appropriate places to be sad about a genocide. And that is what entered my body, sadness. A falling down. A falling down that is also an expanse, almost a prayer. I suppose that it looks more like a Muslim prayer, being bent with my head almost touching the ground. Muslim prayer in front of a synagogue, it somehow feels appropriate now. People try to figure out what’s happening, me too. It feels like a prayer also because while the body is heavy, falling towards the ground, there is also a feeble contra-force pulling upwards. “Poezie” (poetry) is written on a bench here. I wonder if people see my gesture as poetic, political, or just puzzling. I walk back and forth in front of the “mosque” (as I automatically started to write), with the contrast of sadness - feeble levitation in my body, sometimes going with my head down, almost touching the ground, sometimes up, almost touching the sky. It feels like the perfect thing to do in this place, at this time, in this world. I just did that for a while.” (Love-expanse note, in front of the synagogue, Timișoara, 14.10.25)

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.

More notes from inside Love-expanse:

250630 Prague. Love-expanse puts “spirituality” in a new light: Spiritual is to have a sensibility of the body that makes possible intuition, empathy and an embodied love that can create openings towards mysterious outsides / insides (spirits, gods, deep self, abstract transcendent, divine), for possible religious experiences, strange phenomena, unknown. Unspiritual is to be centered in a mental space, in “our” default dynamic of control over body and nature. As we can see, when this dynamic takes over, inequality, exploitation, wars, ecocides are following. Spirituality is love, unspirituality is ideology (religious dogmatism included). In this light, spirituality becomes also radical politics, and love a revolution.

240620 church in Nuremberg. In this context the practice becomes an abstract prayer. My chest is warm. The church makes it easier. I don’t know exactly why, maybe because I was raised as a Christian, maybe because there is some form of love practice already accumulated here, maybe because the other people here enter a more contemplative state, or maybe the place is simply holy. My hands got charged too and they started to bless, not unlike the saints in the icons. I hope people don’t see it as blasphemy. An icon in which rays of light emanate from the Mary and Jesus bodies amplified the love in my body, and the blessings. Now my body just stays on a bench suspended in an empty warm void that spreads from my chest.

221205 flight Bucharest-Berlin. My hands feel very expressive, a bit less while I’m writing. They are collecting affectivity. It feels like I’m a floating affect. The plane feels as an extension of this affect, like an abstraction that almost doesn’t exist, it’s just my body in this charged posture, floating on this affective energy. I feel a lot of warmth in my chest. I hope this energy doesn’t affect some sensors or instruments. Now this affective energy is directed downwards. I’m wondering if people who are meditating or praying at this moment can feel this love that is pouring down from the highs. Now the affect exits my hand like a blessing gesture towards the people here. Some of them try to figure out what’s going on. I hope they feel the love. Now the orientation of the affective connection is upwards, my body receives a kind of grace. It might look religious and maybe it is. I have the feeling that this grace, love, affects are the essence of religious experiences. Although it can be the other way around too, my religious upbringing creates the possibility for this grace coming from up. These thoughts tamed my experience. Now everything is again contained in myself, but not completely.

210626 supermarket, Bucharest. I’m with the small shopping cart in one hand and the phone in the other, my body suddenly stopped my shopping activity at the fruit stands. My chest started to open and to warm up. I’m vulnerable, because I feel the place as extremely noisy and agitated, and the products too strident. Not the fruits though, I feel safer here next to them. I’m too affectively charged. Probably I seem lost, weird. I partially exited my state to pick some apples. I feel that I give myself to the world. I embrace everything. I feel sensitized to some sort of higher force. I understand why the saints in the icons are blessing like this with their hands, it really feels that there is some sort of energy spreading out of my hands. Some shoppers seem puzzled to see me like this. It becomes intense, I feel so much love. I feel that I disintegrate, that a sort of transcendence is imminent. That reality is just one possibility, the walls of reality are very thin. I’m ecstatic but also scared because I clearly feel that reality is a dream and that there is a way to open it like in a lucid dreaming. That I could start to float, change the setting, the space, the time.

Photos from the recent Love-expanse appearances in the frame of Institution of Performance at Casa Tranzit Cluj (former Synagogue where it felt meaningful to enter a Muslim prayer), /Teatre Bucharest, and in the frame of Unmapping in Timisoara.