Love (in institutions)

For the Unmapping process and exhibition, Love focused 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” 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.

A few notes from inside Love, documentation as text:

251019 Unirii Square, Timișoara. Six years ago I was doing Pillar Artist here, in this square. I was providing a lift above the square for people, myself included, one by one, to stay suspended for at least 30 min. on the improvised pillar (scissors lift reminiscent of Brâncuși’s Infinity Column) – an alternative, contemplative way of being in a parallel world amongst people. Now I’m doing kind of the same, creating a parallel possible, but based on this affective charge in my body. It works even better than the pillar, at least for me. I just wonder if it has a similar effect on other people as well. They are definitely noticing. My body enters these altered postures modeled by affect – shapeshifting monuments of love, capturing and diffusing grace for the entire square.

251027 Fiscal Administration, Timisoara. My body is blessing everything and everyone around. It’s mildly put to say that doing this here feels unsolicited. Yet, some people are intrigued, some are smiling and some seem to have an art seeing type of focus. After a while all the anxiety of dealing with administrative and fiscal offices flooded my body. As I wrote this, it entered some self-soothing movements, like blessing itself. And now the other people again. The office workers are watching me from time to time, interrupting their working flow a little. They probably don’t have much time for art, so it’s fitting that I brought Love here. The place feels quite serene now, and it feels that somehow my body did it, together with the pleasant sun entering through the big windows. My body got very warm from all this. Now I’m sitting on a waiting chair like the others, and my body is melted by this serene atmosphere. The disintegration of the body just added to the warmth, to the charge in my body, and to the perplexity of people. It feels like a strange monument of Love in the wrong place. A wrong place that feels perfect now.

251021 Operei Square, Timisoara. My body explores the square randomly, apparently, guided by a subtle affective charge. It’s an important square, the ‘89 revolution (although more and more people prefer to call it otherwise) started here. In any case an important event was taking place here and it feels like somehow some of its waves are reaching my body. Now I have the sensation that some part of me is reaching back in time as well. I started to remember those days and how the news from here affected me. It was something unimaginable, incomprehensible. My body now reaches the bodies that were here back then. Now it reaches my past body of those times, where it was, in Targu Mures. For all this to happen, some small affective adjustments are taking place in my body. Because of these space-time dislocations, the present faded and became strange, the people passing through the square appear as ghosts, the entire atmosphere seems eerie. The hundreds of pigeons hanging out here brought me back to some sort of reality. I’m back, more than before, with something extra in my body.

251014 Timișoara, in front of a synagogue. The imposing, if not sacred atmosphere of the temple 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.

230430 Cao Fei exhibition, Gallery Weekend Berlin. The badminton field, the hens, the camping corner, the serene digital people with octopus tentacles coming out of their bellies, the strange filter on the big windows produce a permissive environment for Love. As soon as I thought that, my body started to slightly deviate from itself and feel the place more. It’s moving around slowly and focused, carried by this receptive state. It’s an enhanced way of experiencing the exhibition. I receive more from works and people. Somehow I also give more, my state gives away that I’m going through something special. People are trying to figure out what I’m doing, my presence puzzles them. With so much stuff going on here, they might suspect that I’m part of the show. And in a way I am, we all are, especially in these contexts where the visitors are somehow integrated. They should assume some risks then. The guards are watching me suspiciously. I somehow understand them, they have the mission to keep things normal. My body is more discreet in its affecting and getting affected. Some postures become charged, catch extra affect, they’re like monuments of love. This might be too much, but writing while it’s happening might play it down a bit. I had to stop, too much attention on me. It was ok while I was perceived as part of the exhibition, but when I became the main focus, my body became normal, at least it appears sufficiently so.

230419 supermarket, Berlin. I’m always affectively connected with something. Sometimes with customers, some of them watching me with suspicion from the corners of their eyes. Sometimes with products, like my left hand with this musli pack here. Sometimes with the words that I write on this phone and the eyes that are reading them. Now that I wrote this, I feel in my chest this connection with you. I slowly spin around and the love from my chest spreads in space and time. Some part is now exactly where and when you read this. Writing this, my here became for a moment your here in my future, your present, double presence. A client just changed direction when she saw me, maybe she saw that I’m not exactly here. Or maybe that I’m more here than normal. I feel here, I’m connected with everything from products to clients and employees. My perception is very sharp. I hear more, I see more and I especially feel more. My left part of the body is affectively touched by the client to my left. Now I walk very slowly, my charged hand triggers attention. It has the power to capture people’s gaze. The quality in my hand changed from magnetizing the attention to sending love. I’m walking slowly with my hands in front, blessing people and products. I hope I don’t scare them, although I might look like the saints in icons and this can be scary. My right hand writes and blesses at the same time… Love retreats in my chest. I’m back to normal, although I still feel more than normal. I’m back to shopping.

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