Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection

Drawing from intimate experiences of cinematic representations of queer love to the design and construction of masculine spaces, this session draws on the tensions and intersections of queer and masculine identities. The presentations focus on films from different geo-political contexts to commercial endeavours of creating spaces that facilitate masculine desires in a heterosocial context.

The films Inxeba (2017), In God’s Own Country (2017) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) are all renowned cultural landmarks which caused ripples globally and in their immediate production environments. They are unified by a similar narrative architecture which gestures towards a structured and highly masculinized vision of (queer) love. All three films set up a dyadic erotic relationship between two men located in the topography of the countryside. All three films adopt a conflict-structure marked by aggressive sex, physical violence, mellowing affection and tragedy. The circumvention of fatalistic tragedy (via the denouement of a ‘happy-ending’) by one of these films fails to obfuscate masculinity’s perennial and morbid anxieties about an amiable version of male affection i.e. one which eschews the optics of masculine bravado. In this paper, my focus lies in these films’ shared representational devices (formal, structural and narrative) as both harbingers for various aspects of masculinity and as transnational envisioning and re-inscriptions of male-to-male eroticism.  On the one hand, these visual overlaps hint at intercontinental, cross-regional commonalities in values about manhood and queerness. On the other hand, they also signal the solidification of distinctive conventions come to codify a constellation of ideologies about same sex desire.

The illustrated plans for bachelor pads that appeared in Playboy during the magazine’s first two decades were completely empty of people, yet the research that has focussed on the design of those spaces has much to say about the imagined inhabitant. The literature constituting “Playboy Studies,” specifically that which deals with Playboy’s actual and fictive architectural undertakings, conveys unreservedly a disdain for bachelor heterosexuality, labelling its amatory expressions as affected. The insult is, if nothing else, perplexing. The mid-century Playboy bachelor was not a fixed figure, but an endlessly mutable silhouette for anyone to imagine themselves. 

In this presentation, I discuss the affaires du coeur sketched out in three of Playboy magazine’s most comprehensive architectural projects—Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment (1956), The Playboy Town House (1962), and Playboy’s Duplex Penthouse (1970). The portfolios set forth in detail a hypothetical tour of each living space and include images that relay what Playboy called “charmed circles”—groupings of art and décor that are said to give delight and arouse admiration. Consider the study room in the Penthouse Apartment: A double-sided fireplace with sheet metal casing thrusts out from a smooth plaster wall. Above it hangs a round shield, beneath which are crossed spears, ostensibly originating from the battlements of a fort. Tall, narrow canvases with swaths of yellow, red and black paint are displayed on either side. The envisioned inhabitant is artistically aware and discerning to the extent that he can select and then group together architectural elements and works of art to a pleasing effect. I argue that the failure to correctly address the thinking behind the curation of the Playboy pads has concealed the impressiveness of that thinking, and as a result has allowed objectionable notions of the Playboy bachelor and, by extension the Playboy magazine reader, to gain wider currency.

bell hooks and Audre Lorde speak to and of, with and from, the power of love. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say ‘that study is what you do with other people…under the name of speculative practice’. This session starts with conversation followed by a workshop, in which the sites and conditions of love at work are explored in the context of the seminar room and in the university.

In conversation, in our seminar room, bell hooks and Audre Lorde speak to and of, with and from, the power of love; of the erotic, of the heart, body, spirit, voice — each, and in concert. And together, even if momentary, we work in love. We propose to explore these ideas, in conversation, then as a workshop, on the sites and conditions of love at work, the seminar room, and the university, enchanted, disaffected.

In conversation, and at work, we follow hooks’ love ethic of ‘showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate.’ From hooks, we find the basis for both enchantment and disaffection; we learn that enchantment cannot exist without disaffection. 

At work, inside the university, we believe Fred Moten and Stefano Harney when they say ‘that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.’ Those shimmering occasional disaffections, fall onto the body — on the table, eye contact, heartfelt diplomacies, WhatsApp messages, cold picket lines — and our bodies are supported by one another. 

Audre Lorde asks how often we ever really love our work, even when it is a struggle. To love (at) work is a privilege; after Lorde, to love (at) work is total feminist empowerment. So we exist, in this moment, between privilege and empowerment. 

When this love reveals the erotic — when the erotic is not concerned with sex — love is the entwining of this spirit and these politics, Lorde suggests: sharing deeply a pursuit with another person, lessening the threat of their difference; and in open and fearless joy.

A shared practice workshop that invites participants to improvisation in its etymological sense that is of negating their ability to foresee any meaning or result and instead to rely on minor gestures of trust and relational sensibility. An exploration of love in its intimate and institutional dimensions as an art of how to do things together.

Please note that this location is not wheelchair accessible.

As a contribution to the fifth biennial PARSE conference, “Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection”, The Faculty of the Powers of Love is a locally initiated process within the Faculty of Fine, Applied & Performing Arts at Gothenburg University, focused on artistic doings filtered through multiple and diverse readings of the theme LOVE. 

With the purpose to enhance and vitalize local engagement among students, teachers, personnel, as well as the local art community in Gothenburg, in the PARSE conference by exploring formats for a broad participatory invitation. The FPL group has been formed, initially consisting of 4 MA students from the MFA in Contemporary Performative Arts at Academy of Music and Drama and a doctoral student in performance practice as facilitator.

Exploring LOVE in its communal, organizational and institutional dimensions as an art of how to be together, FPL is committed to improvisation in the etymological sense of negating (im) commonplace projective and speculative desires to foreclose interpretational and experiential multiplicity by ‘seeing on forehand’ (provideo). With dance philosopher Emma Bigé such negation connects performing arts to a basic gesture of philosophy in the pursuit to avoid what she calls “canned” or “habitual” thought/performance. Prolongating such negation into methods of artistic doings, the FPL develops and invites along heterarchical, para-institutional and undisciplinary routs, exploring the potentials of institutional and art-disciplinary dismeasure. Ethically, and even politically, it means to challenge managerial values of control, finality, predictability and measurability with counterinvestments in trust and communication, or why not: Love.

This session draws together three disparate approaches to artistic practices in a reflection of care through different stages of human existence and development.  Each presentation provides contrasting examples of object (tactile/material) relations while another introduces the sonic as an interpersonal engagement with fragility and care. The overall panel attends to the artist as neither isolated nor singular in having a vision of the world but one whose practice is deeply engaged with worlding and the socio-political responsibilities of care and caring.

Although we know that “dematerialized art” is never actually immaterial, social practice is generally read against previous works by individual, attributed artists, leaving all of the affective labor involved unnamed, unacknowledged, and unexamined, or at least excluded from any claims on authorship. This essay, therefore, leverages the experiences of those engaged in performance labor in well-known works of art over the larger discourses set by individual artists, critics, and presenting institutions. Foregrounding the relational constitution of meaning begs a deeper exploration of the actual mechanics involved. How is the relationality claimed by social practice artists co-constructed, conveyed, and sustained among performers and participants—the most common collective form in art production that somehow still eludes satisfactory attention? How might these lower level “grounds for being-in-common” begin to recover the different tensions and forms of negotiation that late Capitalism sutures?

In his work, psychoanalyst and pediatrician DW Winnicott does not discuss the infant alone. It makes no sense to speak of a baby in isolation because the infant does not exist as a discrete subject outside of their relationship of care. He claims, “There’s no such thing as a baby. There is a baby and someone.” Psychologist Patricia Crittenden underscores this insight, stating, “How can one evaluate a dyadic strategy if one sees only the infant?” Indeed, how can one understand any relation—a dyad, thirdness, or otherwise—when only tracking one point in a generative collaboration? A return to object relations is meant to explore how relationality might elucidate methods of interaffective exchange with the potential to co-construct intersubjectivities and mutuality. The effort here is to begin to decouple socially engaged artworks from the strict regime of the artist as genius, celebrity, auteur, or commodity. There is no such thing as an artist. There is an artist and someone.

Radio Ballads: Songs for Change takes its name from a revolutionary series of radio programmes, broadcast on the BBC from 1957-64: a time of rapid change across the UK. Combining song, music and sound effects with the voices and stories of communities, each original Ballad focussed on the lived experiences of workers and groups whose voices were rarely, or never, heard in the media. Ballads can describe poems or narratives set to song, which were traditionally passed on from person to person, meaning they changed over time and were collectively authored. For centuries, ballads were a primary and highly accessible source of information, sharing newsworthy events across divisions of class, education, gender, and age. Ballads were closely linked to the process of grieving and sharing grief publicly. They were usually written or performed in the first-person, offering a framework for their singers to interpret the world around them. 

Building on these histories of collective song and story-telling this presentation/workshop will share the process of creating four new Radio Ballads from 2019 – 2022 with artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim, Ilona Sagar, in collaboration with carers, organisers, social workers and residents to develop four bodies of research. Produced in the wake of twelve years of austerity and amid the ongoing dismantling of the UK care sector, the projects were sustained through multiple national and global crises and against the backdrop of continued systemic racism and ableism. 

The presentation/workshop will feature the voices of people whose work and care keep many of us a float, and will be guided by eight songs for collaborative work that weave together the four artist projects; Listening, Dreaming, Embodying, Voicing, Supporting, Connecting, Processing and Working with Systems. Centring the voices and experiences of care workers – and of those receiving and giving care through more informal networks – the presentation/workshop will share complex and intimate stories of living and working in the current moment. Asking how artistic processes can support systemic change, we will consider the ways in which creative collaboration can offer space to witness and process experiences of mental health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, grief and end of life care – and to reflect on collective care, interdependence and healing. 

By contemplating how we collectively imagine and navigate the past, present and future, the presentation/workshop will explores art’s capacity to generate new possibilities for us to care, gather and govern together, and asks: what kind of collective songs are needed today?

The talk shares the research, active caring-for and indeed love that informed the creation of the artwork “Geography of the Body and Land”, commissioned by Röda Sten Konsthall in 2022. The work consists of three major site-specific works and the poem “Homecoming” (which I will perform for the PARSE conference). Each of the three installations is inspired by a different layer of the pelvic floor. Located at the centre of our bodies the pelvic floor is both central for our entire posture and the process of birth. It is a place where new life coming into being passes through. Birth may be described as the most important, mysterious and sacred of events. Yet it is an experience marked by stark contrasts, and systemic inequalities. I will draw connections between the relational qualities of working with the material clay and the practice(s) of caring. Researcher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s quote “Care is not one way; the cared for coforms the carer too” speaks of this plural notion of giving and receiving, that I as an artist working with clay experience too. I touch the clay and the clay in turn touches me. In the process of birth touch plays a central role too. In 2022, I trained to become a doula, a birth companion, which crucially informed the making of the artwork for Röda Sten. A doula’s role is to provide continuous, safe support during pregnancy, partum and post-partum in order for the birthing person to feel empowered, thus actively reducing the risk of a traumatic birth experience. The intimate and hands-on care a doula provides can be paralleled to the way I work with the material clay. Clay is at once both fragile and strong. Clay as material has memory. So do our bodies. Love is the link.

Attuned to the idea that love is deeply intertwined with social and economic structures which produces a particular kind of social hegemony, this session turns its attention to how scholars and artists have attempted to shift away from reifying love towards more open forms of communal alliances. By critically looking at the ideas of collective and participatory practices of Kassel Documenta 15, the presentation aims to explore the affordances and limitations of such mega-event structures in rethinking love.

In “À la recherche du temps perdu” we follow the narrator unravelling threads of suspicion and culpability as he tries to interpret the void signs of mondainetè and the lying signs of love. As both love and social relationships seem to be built on signs that either express a false or an absence of meaning, the narrator clings to materiality and to the signs of art to find truth and trustworthy memory. These confessions of a modern man describe the reified nature of love in the beginning of the XXth century. 

Love is deeply intertwined with social and economic structures. Romantic love, as a structure inherited from bourgeois moralism, is a development of relationships of economic and political alliance between families, understood as social units. Deleuze & Guattari have further developed the analysis of Engels and Levi-Strauss, to find the role such structures play in the codification of desiring fluxes. The family is the first social unit that integrates individuals into the social hegemon, reifying the love we experience and placing interdictions that block the fluxes of desire.  

Throughout the second half of the XXth century, scholars and artists alike have tried to unreify love, to open it to other forms of communal alliances that don’t reproduce the social hegemon. Focusing on Donna Haraway proposal of interspecies kin, this paper will review the collective and participatory practices of Kassel Documenta 15, to understand how these practices challenge hegemonic social production, exactly by rethinking love and the bond between audience and artist, and by unsegregating different aspects of social experience. Likewise, it will discuss how the mega-event structure of Documenta limits, blocks or perverts the full experience of these practices.

The ‘transcultural’ provides a framework for thinking through global exchanges and modes of commonality in curatorial practices. This session addresses curatorial modes as a way to address the new within culturally entangled societies. Haus der Kuturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin provides an entry for a series of cross geographic perspectives from Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Jamaica.

The idea of the ‘transcultural’ is currently gaining momentum in artistic and curatorial contexts, providing a framework for thinking through global exchanges and modes of commonality. As anthropologist Cathrine Bublatzky has put it “Engaging transculturality as an analytical perspective foregrounds a conceptual landscape for considering cultures as relational webs and flows of significance in active interaction with one another (s. 9-10

Haus der Kuturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin provides an interesting case when seeking to explore a transcultural perspective such as the one proposed by Bublatzky. When re-opening in June, HKW’s programme includes blessings, concerts, performances, processions, readings, and rituals as well as the launch of the exhibition project O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies. The curatorial team at HKW seeks to relate all of these activities to past and present practices of commonality, hospitality and the value of plurality. In this way, it seeks to inspire new ways of producing knowledge, adjusted to local contexts, and to create social spaces of encounter characterized by love, friendship, and care.

 In my presentation, I will explore how curatorial practices can deal with the ongoing transculturation processes characterizing today’s European communities. More specifically, I will focus on three questions: How is conviviality as a friction-filled form of being-in-common explored by an experimental exhibition space such as HKW? By means of which curatorial modes of address might new forms of commonality be created within today’s culturally entangled societies? And how can an exhibition such as O Quilombismo contribute to the creation of new sites of love, care and transcultural encounters by engaging with other epistemic and philosophical traditions such as the ones practiced by the quilombos (Brazil), cumbes (Venezuela), palenques (Cuba and Colombia), cimarrones (Mexico) and maroon communities (Jamaica).

Navigating the intricacies of acquiring, interpreting, and presenting knowledge, a recurring question arises: How can we prioritise affective listening at the core? Victoria Karlsson advocates for a queer methodology that emphasises auditory perception and attentive engagement. Concurrently, John-Paul Zaccarini propels a performative and experimental pedagogy, delving into the intricacies of Blackness.

This paper aims to identify and map out the overlaps and intersections between listening, sound, queer theory and affect, asking if we can listen queerly, and what that means for our understanding of sound and listening. 

It takes, as its starting point, the idea of sound as something dangerous and unruly, sounds like those described by David Toop in Sinister Resonance (2011);  “..a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny…”  (Toop, 2011, p. xv). Sounds which travel through walls, penetrate bodies – sounds which will not remain contained or controlled.

It considers a listening contextualised through ideas of affect theory as something “dialogical and relational, directed towards the other” (Lisa Blackman, “Immaterial Bodies” p 39)  

Finally it considers  ‘queer listening’, as sketched out by Yvon Bonenfant in “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres” (2010) a listening which  “reaches toward, the disoriented or differently oriented other(…) Queer is always listening out through the static produced by not-queer emanations of vocalic bodies.”

This paper aims to trace the convergences and overlaps between sound – not sound as ethereal and  fragile, but instead sounds as uncontrollable, dangerous and unruly; listening and affect; and queer theory. It asks if, within these intersections, a queer listening and queer sounding can be identified, beyond, within or underneath the “static produced by not-queer emanations of vocalic bodies” (Bonenfant). What would such sound and listening tell us about our everyday relationship to sound and listening? Can we trace a correlation between (queer) listening, sounding and love, imagined by belle hooks in “All About Love” as a practice which “holds no place of safety” (p 153). Can we listen as we might (queerly) love, willingly letting ourselves be “acted upon by forces outside our control” (hooks; p 153)?

FutureBrownSpace is a research initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, healing, of being, activism or community.) 

We develop an experimental black pedagogy, based in decolonized psychoanalysis, performative ethnographies, and a black curatorial gaze.  Making sense through the senses we employ the anxiety produced by a minority black/brown body in majority non-brown/black space as a dramaturgical tool to guide a journey of grief, while retaining our Black Chill, withdrawal from masochistic contracts of white envy (we’ve heard enough about guilt) and performances of blackness for the white gaze. Working between spaces of black expertise and majority non-black space, allows us to explore how majority space forecloses black desire, and what it might fear from its agency. 

Whether your access to Black Study is through the brown, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study.

This session’s presentations will question epistemological norms by rethinking the relations between objects of study, models of narrativization, and subjectivities. In challenging conventions of monologic and monolithic approaches the presentations will rehearse methodological approaches that tend to the potential co-convening of asymmetries, antagonisms, and dissensus.

When traveling across an ocean to undertake a PhD the inevitable question of what to pack arises. It was suggested to only bring the books that were not common and the rest would be there. It is on my arrival that the unsettling fact of what was thought of as common in my research was not available at an arm’s reach. Finding bell hooks “All About Love” on the fiction shelf was perhaps the most unsettling reminder that the writers and theories I surround myself with, were possibly not considered legitimate or at least common. As Laverne Cox mentioned in a public dialogue with bell hooks at The New School in 2014, trans and queer ways of thinking have grown from Black feminism. What does it mean here as a non-binary trans body to build work and research on what is now considered fiction?

Using an epistolary format in reference to Eve Tucks essay “Breaking Up With Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable” and Julietta Singh’s book “The Breaks”, this presentation is a series of letters written to bell hooks. Weaving narrative and theory to question what legitimacy is and how to survive in an academic space as a non cis hetero patriarchal body: How does one move forward when the foundations stood on are labeled as fictional? When building a method based on desire, how can queer love be tended in the academies of Sweden? How do marginalized bodies navigate Sarah Ahmed’s narratives of precarity while undertaking work and love in a place such as Sweden as Susan Sontag navigates in her writing “Letter From Sweden”? Does teasing apart and disagreeing with portions of “All About Love” support its positioning as fiction in Sweden? Is there a necessity to legitimize “All About Love” as non-fiction before expanding and growing from it?

“I named that need desire. And desire named me struggle.”
(Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name (Europa Editions, 2013)

Drawing on the rich writing of authors such as Elena Ferrante and Carmen Maria Machado, the compelling visual works of artists like Kara Walker and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I would like to explore the intricacies of collective forms of love and care, and their potentialities, through the lens of what philosopher Jacques Rancière terms ‘dissensus’.

By exploring the interplay between joy, sadness, hope, and fear in our desire for enchantment and connection, we can gain insight into the complexities and contradictions of these experiences. Tracing passionate stories of love that are also fraught with dissonances, asymmetries, and antagonisms–trying out the value of dissensus as a generative force–my paper will examine the ways in which these complexities can lead to productive outcomes and new forms of collectivity that challenge conventional notions of love and desire, as a way to bring about more inclusive and accountable communities.

As we engage with the intricacies of collective affections, it is crucial to consider the ethical dilemmas that arise when desire and harm intersect. How can we recognize and hold space for the messiness and contradictions of these experiences while still striving towards greater collective action and social change? Employing political philosophy and decolonial theory, my paper explores frameworks for understanding the relationship between desire, harm, and collective action. 

Through an engagement with diverse artistic strategies and tactics, I want to probe how disaffection could potentially bring us toward collective action and social change. Rather than shying away from the discomfort and discord that can arise within intimate relationships and collectivity alike, my paper will examine how moments of dissensus can create spaces of radical openness and empathy, and allow us to embrace new possibilities for being in common.

This panel addresses questions that concern the charged and always present relation between the personal and political; how dreams and memories are constructed, shared and archived through collective artistic processes and different lens media techniques. Each of the presenters draws from their individual practices as a starting point in their enquiry of online and analogue formats. Images and imaginations are instruments to analyze and engage in questions and experiences of freedom and love.

While the 80s and 90s saw the introduction of new forms of photographic archiving of love and life by artists such as Nan Goldins, Wolfgan Tillmans and others, experimenting with both temporal and spatial strategies of staging the personal archive, challenging expectations around both content and professional technique and presentation, today we see Social Media and Instagram especially, as a privileged repository for both personal and anonymous archives (see for example, Lee Shulman’s ‘Anonymous Photo Project’, and Lisa Sorgini’s pandemic project ‘Behind Glass’). 

For this presentation, I will examine temporal and virtual spaces of social media for the presentation of a personal photographic archive through ‘Our Days of Gold’, an ongoing durational artwork constituted of a cluster of three interconnected Instagram accounts: @ourdaysofgold_film, @ourdaysofgold_digital and @ourdaysofgold. The projects weaves two separate temporalities: the social media accounts started in April 2017 to mark the first anniversary of my mother Cécile Barbiaux’s sudden death, drawing on an archive of film and digital photography recording an image making collaboration that took place between 2002 and 2007. 

Staging a group of family and friends, the images oscillate between everyday activities and improvised performances within the confines of a familial territory of ancient farm-houses, orange groves and gardens in Sorrento, Italy. The images, shared daily are accompanied by captions that centre Cécile even when she is not in the frame. Cécile is staged as mysterious and alluring protagonist of her own unfolding story.

Through its activation of Instagram’s languages, communities, specific structure and affordances, ‘Our Days of Gold’ creates a virtual space for a temporal paradox, where the past becomes contemporary by being stretched to excruciating slowness over the duration of the present, with one summer afternoon taking over 9 months to share at the glacial pace of an image a day. Re-animation is explored through the suspension of knowledge, and love and mourning can be shared with strangers in the present, in ‘the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument’(Enzewor 2008).

Filmmakers Nobunye Levin and Palesa Shongwe will present their work Reverie (2023) in the context of a performance talk that operates as a kind of expanded cinema where facets of the film’s form and concept spill over into the screening room through their embodiment in the performance and the performers. Reverie (2023) lies at the nexus of the essay film and videographic criticism. It is assembled from film fragments and out-takes from the filmmakers’ previous works, and fragments of text and conversation to reveal a feminist love praxis in the collaborative life of the two filmmakers. In Reverie, the love labour performed in the friendship of the filmmakers is realised through film, and functions as a generative mode of collaborative film praxis that negotiates the tensions and possibilities between dreaming and freedom. Reverie is concerned with a “new cinephilia” (Shambu, 2019) – a critical orientation towards the love of cinema, demanding it be mobilised as a “worldmaking” activity involved in the political transformation of the world through a transformation of representational practices (Srinivasan as cited in Balsom & Peleg, 2022). Reverie is a work in process, revealing knowledge as open-endedness. It is a work of epistolary, ephemeral impressions, organised through the “logic” and action of reverie, where echo and resonance are considered. Freedom and pleasure are imagined through the aesthetic and form of states of reverie, where the haptic is also conjured as a further site of freedom and pleasure. Reverie is a relational reverie, where a series of women dream of one another in call and response – a freedom dream (Kelley, 2002) tracing the reverberations of various “freedom dreams” (Kelley, 2002) in the audio-visual bonds between the different fragments. In this tracing of the notion of a freedom dream is the consideration of reverie as a political concept for “emancipatory dreams” (Verges, 2021) and dreaming – a tool of political action to ward off the inertia of despair.

The historical contextualization of this workshop is the colonial archive of St Barthélemy, a Swedish colony  (1784 – 1878) which will be revisited from the perspectives of hybridity and the intimacies of relationships between colonized and colonizer, black and white.  The workshop method draws from speculative fabulation (Saidiya Hartman, Donna Haraway) to reflect on ways in which forgotten and hidden histories may be reconsidered and re-told by connecting futures with the past (in the form of Octavia Butler’s time travel narratives). The workshop is a methodological investigation using a specific case study from the history in St Barthelemy from Swedish colonial rule to activate creative and critical dialogue on how to reveal heterogeneous and complex histories and identities from the colonial past.

This workshop invites participants to create queer selfies that present glitchy, composite selves in a more-than-human, multispecies tentacular entanglement (as described by Donna Haraway, 2016). After an introduction to the concepts, participants will make and model wearable colleges in self-portrait shoots and iif willing, participate in a communal selfie shoot.

This experimental workshop critiques idealised heteronormative gender expectations in selfies and portraiture, and considers selfie taking and sharing as practices of care and self-love. Research on selfies finds that negative feedback in comments and the currency of likes reinforce and police dominant (binary) feminine or masculine beauty ideals (Döring et al. 2016). Research shows that bodies that do not adhere to these norms, such as those marginalised in terms of race, gender, sexuality, size and disability, are likely to be visible for criticism and invisible in terms of their needs, desires, and values (Woolley, 2023). Online hostility may prevent people who are already marginalised from receiving the benefits of being visible and building communities on social media. Despite these well documented negative impacts, selfies are an important mode of self-presentation and community building / peer support. In research with trans and gender-fluid Tumblr users, Vivienne (2017) found positive comments on selfies helped promote body acceptance and that users viewed trans and gender-fluid selfies as defying industries that promote binary beauty ideals and capitalise on consumer’s insecurities. 

The self-portraiture workshop will invite participants to use an experimental smartphone app and creative analogue collage methods (online or in-person) to create queer selfies that rebel against the idealised self-contained individual who has a coherent, knowable (and therefore marketisable) identity. Queer selfies present the individual as a glitchy, composite formed from fragments of body and environment, self and other, human and non-human. They de-centre the individual and challenge the human centricity of consumer culture, because the process of queering selfies is communal and dependent on shared knowledges and experiences. They present a complex impression of life in a moment in time in a more-than-human multispecies tentacular entanglement, to use Donna Haraway’s terms (2016).

This session provides an immersive emotional, affective and often controversial relationship with the non human. From performing intimate acts of care for and with objects to engaging with AI chatbots in romantic or friendly relationships – these contributions explore the thresholds between the physical and the digital, the tangible and the ethereal, the breathing and the non-living.

Please note that there will be flowers in the room.

Pet Objects and Needy Objects

In todays material driven society, we have more things than we can care for emotionally. The objects that make up our everyday are simply not designed for caring through embodiment or affection. However, humans are predisposed to project human emotions and beliefs onto any-thing to rationalise and process from the external to the internal. Objects that exude empathy (care) can affect our emotional being and can define the way humans and non-human objects interact with each other and sustain a more lasting relationship between the two.

Humans are social creatures and react strongly to emotional cues. Facial expressions and body language are natural when evaluating a persons mood or emotional state but can also be used to assess anything “vaguely lifelike”. These lifelike characteristics have been explored through various activities and active agents (tools) to test the boundaries of emotional care and to problematise care within a new embodied relationship between body and object.

Materials have properties and characteristics that can inform an objects care function and instruct their needed care. Simple actions such as combing a hairy material object can be viewed as a fundamental and trivial act of caring between product and consumer. To keep the objects hair in order, it needs to be combed, maintained, and cared for. Failure to do so will result in tangled hair, or what can be universally understood as visual representation of carelessness.

Care is a fundamental human behaviour that can define the way humans and non-human objects interact with
each other. The objects presented in this interactive presentation demand care by design and have the potential of aiding in a more meaningful interaction with our material surroundings. These alternative objects demand our attention, and, in some cases, they demand our affection. This is highlighted within the objects materiality and function by design of artefacts that are referred to as emotionally intelligent objects.

A last refuge from loneliness.

This is what one user termed the generative AI chatbot programme Replika, which has amassed over 10 million users globally since its launch in 2017, having seen a 35% increase during and after the Covid 19 pandemic. Replika, marketed as a virtual companion app, allows users to design a friend or romantic partner as a way of building a virtual relationship which is, according to the app’s marketing, “always on your side”.

Owned by the software development company Luka, Replika has, particularly in the last year, generated ethical and legal controversy regarding data protection and sexual and psychological violence, with Italy banning the app from using the personal data of Italian users, citing risk to minors due to the app’s absence of age regulations. At the same time, users are quick to Replika’s defence, saying it has been a vital aid in managing loneliness and suicidal ideation as well as in the maintenance and development of their physical relationships. What has become evident, is that the core of this debate rests on Replika’s capacity to force a deep interrogation of human sexuality, human-machine futures and what it means to experience love.

you, me and koda is a prototype in the form of a video essay which investigates this landscape. It looks specifically at the spatial threshold operating between the technological, emotional and ethical interiors of two relationships – one operating between human and AI “inside” Replika and one operating between two humans “outside”. Using fragmentation as a methodological approach, the essay considers how these settings influence, blur and mutually support each other, as well as what tensions are generated and negotiated within the hybridity of the threshold space.

How might researchers account for love and desire? Love, understood as a state of openness for the other’s inconvenience, which disorganizes our lives but opens us to move beyond ourselves.  Could this help us to navigate the desirous boundaries and intimate involvements of research practices? This workshop on writing love letters forms part of ethnographic research methodology.

Please bring with you a talisman or artifact that reminds you of something/someone/sometime significant to your research. The talisman or artifact might be a photograph, a passage of your field notes, the lyrics to a song, a piece of stone – whatever activates a connection (however tender or difficult) to an important part/moment of your work.

Can we consider love as a political project beyond the capitalist logic of feeling, and what can we learn from artistic practices in this regard? How does the question of desire and the production of desire in/through art plays into this issue? 

These are the pivotal questions of my proposed contribution, which takes the intimacy of the epistolary form as its mode of address. It will tie together theoretical references, personal writings, and reflections on the manifestations of the politics and the work of love, informed by the practices of Pauline Curnier Jardin & The Feelgood Cooperative, Selma Selman, Clementine Edwards, Robert Gabris a.o. It will source from the research project Forms of Kinship (2021–ongoing), which has manifested as a monthly series of discursive events, an exhibition titled Unruly Kinships at Temporary Gallery CCA in Cologne, an array of public events, and marked the start of my Infinite Love Letter project.

Under capitalism love is a highly privatised resource (Alva Gotby), which is regarded in terms of scarcity. But as thinkers like Sophie Lewis, Bini Adamczak, and Laurent Berlant teach us, love can be thought of as an infinite supply that allows for thinking beyond the individual self. 

The letter takes as its point of departure Berlant’s proposition of love as a state of openness for the other’s inconvenience, which disorganizes our lives and opens us to move beyond ourselves, and Lewis’ understanding of love as a struggle for another’s autonomy and for their immersion in care. Thinking with the practices of the aforementioned artists, it will contemplate the work of love that facilitates perspectives and approaches that strive towards new solidarities, affinities and alliances.

Ethnographers often grapple with the desirous boundaries of research. What does it mean to be intimately involved in a community, while also producing research about it? How does one walk the borderland between desire and distance? 

Tuck and Yang (2014) push against ethnography’s symbolic violence which, in its claims to objectivity, objectifies interlocutors. Tuck (2009) argues for desire-based research, in lieu of damage-centered narratives, where desire is ‘about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future’ (417). Yet in Tuck’s formulation, researchers must negate desire: only in absenting her own desires can a researcher ethically center the desires, and be in community with, her interlocutors.

Others argue that attending to community requires the inverse: one must account for desire, love, and one’s subjectivity. For hooks (2000) love is a practice in vulnerability, a charge to openly communicate with others. Baldwin (1963) understood love as an unmasking, and heartbreak as a method of connection. Butler (2005) argues that giving a holistic account of oneself is an ethical act. So: how might researchers account for the love and desire we experience in our work? Can we do this in a way that does not objectify the communities with whom we engage? What might giving an honest account of this desire mean for keeping ourselves accountable? 

We argue for the inclusion of love letters as a means of critically articulating individual and collective desires in the research context. This workshop will attend to the dialectic of desire and distance, where desire constitutes a striving that is not necessarily romantic/erotic, but might be nostalgic, familial, ecological, political, etc. After a (brief) discussion reflecting on these questions in our own work, we will lead participants in a workshop on writing love letters as part of ethnographic research methodology.

A bibliographical transmission influenced by the matriarchal line of a family meets an embodied journey into the wonders of sonic enchantment: A Sankofa (a Twi word from the Akan Tribe in Ghana meaning to go back and get) inspired ceremony of veneration and a re-enactment of early Romantic musical performance.

In her research as an artist-researcher, Clareese Hill collaborates with the Ancestors and the Nowcestors. The Ancestors are theorists, family, and other influences, who are not yet realized, who have passed and are no longer observing a linear temporality are held in reverence. Nowcestors is a term canonized in her Ph.D. thesis as the theorist, people, and influences that reflect and live in the same post-colonial ontological precarity that she lives in or that is adjacent.

“Transmission: Ceremony for the Bibliography” is a performance lecture about the role that love plays in her lifelong bibliography, which includes theoretical and artistic influences foregrounded by the familial matriarchal line in her family. By abstracting the academic trope of citing, she will perform a bibliography through the practice of ceremony and not extraction. Through the writing of bell hooks about love, she will conjure a ceremony navigating a cartography of love in her bibliography. As an Afro-Caribbean American woman and the child of immigrants and from a line of single mothers, reverence and remembering are critical to participate in her version of a progress narrative. This methodology establishes the intention of Sankofa, a Twi word from the Akan Tribe in Ghana that means looking back to move forward. Her research is about being in conversation and communicating across various cartographic trajectories planes. The performance will be a ceremony of veneration for the Ancestors and Nowcestors.

A musical performance is a complex, multi-sensorial and interactive artistic act. In the early Romantic music aesthetics, the performance was attributed with the potential to create an experience of synthesis between the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, as well as between the actors involved: the performers, listeners, composers, the sounding music and musical instruments. Music was said to be able to enflame the heart to a warm love, and to give access to another, supernatural world of the unfathomable. The performers wished to enchant and move the listeners, to make them respond sympathetically to their feelings. The listener’s reactions in turn could inspire the performers, create thrilling and wondrous effects in their hearts. To transport oneself outside of one’s own self and sympathetically identify with somebody else, was a common way of thinking about relations in early Romanticism. For a performer, engaging in the ineffable and unutterable, constantly changing sentiments of the music requires both an inward orientation, and an act of sympathy. Like love, sympathy permits the self to escape its own confines, to perceive things in a new way, and to coalesce both the subjective self and the objective other. According to the early Romantic performance discourse, music incorporates the composer’s inner feelings and ideas, and the performer who sympathetically resonates with the music can identify with the composer’s self. This idea of self-transformation involves the performer’s own imagination, memories, and experiences. It further supports a feeling of shared geniality and creativity, and of extended self-expression and authority. In the project presented in this contribution, these aesthetic ideas and mindsets are contextualized and re-enacted by both performers and listeners in musical performances. The contribution includes two video-filmed re-enactments, with chamber music by Schubert and Beethoven, where the listener’s real-time thoughts and feelings are visualized.

This session addresses a wide range of practices with a common thread of critically re-arranging human centric, institutionalized notions of relational ethics. The talks posit different forms of curatorial friction, material violence or destabilized encounters with desire in art practice. They are reimagined as calls to shift the work of love from colonialist and capitalist images of togetherness to more engaged, accountable and/or dynamic expressions of co-creation.

The proposed contribution would be a talk and demo on the project “Queering Bash”, which is a work-in-progress artistic/technical manual, to focus on learning code otherwise. This talk will introduce the UNIX philosophy from a queer critical perspective, reimagining a human/computer relation that upsets the gendernormativity embedded in years of free software development. Bash is a command line interface and a scripting language developed in 1989 as a piece of free software for UNIX Systems (Linux and Mac OS but it has been also ported to Windows) and it is a very useful program for system administration, file management, generating reports and automating tasks. Shell scripting has been serially developed by one man at a time. Bash was a replacement of two previous shells. Yet it has been ubiquitous in most of our world’s servers and personal computers. The talk will share the outcome of a Queering Bash workshop that was conducted early this year with participants to create their queer love letter in Bash. By running and executing Bash scripts to express various forms of desires, intimacies and struggles as a way to reimagine what our relationship with the machines we use might look like. The talk will subvert the prevailing norms of technology, namely efficiency, utility, and productivity within capitalistic logics, by coding otherwise.

After 60 years of civil war in Colombia, the common question is: how to end violence? In this paper, I ask: what if violence is not the thing to stop? What if violence is the opposite of brutality? Can violence resist brutality? 

Brutality is Picar para tamal (Chopping for a tamale), a practice employed to this day by different Colombian armies against marginalized populations, which consists of ripping “into tiny pieces the human body, as cooks do with the meat that goes into the well-known popular dish.” Violence is La vamo’ a tumbar (We’re Going to Tear it Down), a song by Afro-Colombian composer and scholar Octavio Panesso. In it, the leading voice offers his house to be torn down during a party. In a country where Afrodiasporic communities struggle against public and private organizations seeking to grab their land, the song proposes that private property only makes sense if shared. 

While the brutality of Picar para tamal relies on the subject who affirms themself by annihilating the other, the violence of La vamo’ a tumbar is manifested in the strident shrieks of its clarinet and the list of indications to the audience on how to tear down their property and help others to tear down theirs. The clarinet impels the public to open what individualizes them (i.e., “my house”) to share themselves with others, like a tamale with its vegetable leaf wrappers. Let me call this violence: love. 

I use Arendt, Levinas, Agamben, and Benjamin’s reflections on violence to suggest that the brutality of Picar para tamal is a colonial legacy born to control the type of violence La vamo’ a tumbar stimulates一one that aims for the “concretely human global” that Sylvia Wynter longs for, in which the “We” against the “Other” is replaced by a “concretely We.”

Introduction to Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2023 by Artistic Director Sarah Hansson and Göteborg Konsthall Artistic Director Petra Johansson.

Join us in a peer to peer reflection taking its starting point in one of the public program concepts of the biennial. “Such as in a Mirror” has been a series of intimate presentations where one artist has been invited to mirrors another artist’s work.

forms of the surrounding futures adopt queer as an expanded perspective to challenge dominant narratives, replacing them by a broad rethinking and remaking of bodies, spaces and times. By embracing different agencies in a nonconforming affinity, they question the constructed features of the present and promote the emergence of various futures.

forms of the surrounding futures propose cognitive, emotional and sensual forms of engagement, materialising communal moments of othering and estrangement. Projecting a polyphonic and multi-sensorial set of positions, they celebrate and empower our collective ability to imagine and rehearse worlds to come.

https://goteborgskonsthall.se/en/exhibition/goteborgs-internationella-konstbiennal-2023-gibca/

Göteborgs Konsthall is a leading space for contemporary art in Sweden. Situated in a classicist building from 1923 and located in central Gothenburg, the institution presents three to four exhibitions per year focusing on both nordic and international artists. For the past 20 years, Göteborgs Konsthall has been a collaborative partner of the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA). Free admission.

Music, dance, touch and composition are described as transformative, speculative practices in this session. As politically vibrant material agencies, sound and movement are tender matters with intimate potency: reimagining embodiment between self and community. Love emerges as a form of collective attention in the critical reimagining of political binaries, anti-capitalist relations and the work of one’s own senses in manifesting social change.

Music and love are elusive experiences: the one silent and the other sounding; their histories and practices are intertwined, and their powers have long been part of philosophical and societal discourse. 

In his choral work The Deer’s Cry Estonian composer Arvo Pärt explores contemporary resonances of an ancient existential practice for the protection of the self and the promotion of social cohesion. Through a series of incantations based on a Lorica attributed to the fifth century Irish saint St Patrick, the poetic text explores the human need for protection in the face of danger, and the place of both self- and sacrificial love in the ecology of every-day life. The formal and textural structure of the music hides a complementary technique, that spreads an enchantment over both performer and listener.

In October 2023 I will be making a field trip to the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia. To reach the Centre you walk through a forest. The Centre comprises a library and a concert hall, and, at its heart, a small Orthodox chapel. 

Through walking and writing, taking part in the life of the Centre, meditating on and performing The Deer’s Cry and other compositions by Pärt I will be asking myself how and why his music is said to express and inculcate the experience of love. And whether this includes the kind of love that enables differences to flourish and hegemonic hierarchies to diminish.

In her presentation, Kaisa Lassinaro addresses dance as a speculative practice. She emphasizes the potential power of senses, movement, and touch to call forth new ways of living, alternative relational structures, and different sorts of subjects into the world. The interpretative openness of dance is considered by her to offer a space for speculation – a space for a future-opening practice that opposes financial speculation – an enclosing practice that cancels the futures of the many. The enabling speculation, as Lassinaro describes, is associated with feminist science fiction, afrofuturism, and queer temporal theory, which have visualized futures beyond the ‘realism’ of the dominant – gendered, white, heteronormative – linear narratives. Sensory experiences, according to her perspective, are entwined with making sense, resulting in a new sensibility, in a utopia that is present already. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney point out in their title “The Undercommons” (2013), this is a way to study, a way to gain knowledge, yet it is the kind of knowledge and kind of studying that goes unregarded in a productivist society. Lassinaro connects this to Jacques Rancière’s thinking on aesthetics and the political, viewing dance as linking to politics as a form of sensory perception that invents new subjects and new forms of collective enunciation, as well as new bodily capacities. She notes that new bodily capacities refer to Erin Manning’s consideration of the way sensing bodies in movement are in a state of potential becoming. The becoming-body in the speculative practice of dance, as Lassinaro explains, is what gives space for world-making, as explored by scholars such as José Muñoz through queer theory. She applies this theoretical framework to examples of dance and choreographical practices by Helsinki-based artists Sonya Lindfors and Satu Herrala, whose practices explore imagining and agency building through movement and the energy built in collective assemblage.

This session on textile relations addresses the gap between the familiar perception of textile work as benign, and the far from innocent social dynamics often at work beneath the surface. From a historical perspective, the South African-Danish artist couple Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984) faced ostracization that arguably drew the couple closer to each other’s practices. In the contemporary context, the Swedish artist Emelie Röndahl weaves imagery that exposes the family intimacies existing between the textile, childhood, death, and the artist’s own body.

The artists who signed the CoBrA manifesto (Nov 1948) and exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1949) and Palais des Beaux Arts, Liège (1951) were seemingly motivated by a desire to work in non-academic ways including embracing spontaneity, the primitif and the childlike, and collaboration. One could say they believed that their example of artistic friendships could prove a model for societal cohesion.  Yet in a matter of three years, the movement ended as the artists moved on in different directions.

Artists Ernest Mancoba (1904-2002, South Africa/France) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911-1984, Denmark/France) met and married in Paris. They returned to Ferlov’s native Denmark after World War II where, no doubt, Ferlov hoped to revive the artistic friendships of her youth. They were invited to participate in the annual exhibition of the Danish art association Høst in 1948, to which the Danish signatory of the CoBrA manifesto, Asger Jorn, invited his Belgium and Dutch counterparts. Thus Mancoba and Ferlov Mancoba met, be-friended and then grew estranged from the Danish avant-garde and the CoBrA artists. Nevertheless their experiences during this period would have an impact on the directions of their work. 

This paper considers the insider-outsider relationships of Mancoba and Ferlov with the CoBrA artists, particularly the Danish avant-garde. In this way it offers a critical lens on the CoBrA art movement in its idealistic mission versus its actual relationship in this particular incidence. It also considers how Mancoba and Ferlov, having been estranged from the Danish art community, turned to each other to essentially create their own artistic association and the impact this would have on their subsequent oeuvres.

The story Emelie Röndal presents, about why she handwove a huge portrait of her dying dog Maxim, is a story of love for the dog, a kind of tribute. But there are many more ways to look at it. Laura Mulvey, the British feminist film theorist, best known for her essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), explored how mainstream films appealed to a male gaze because the industry was dominated by men who, inevitably, constructed representations of women from a masculine point of view. The meaning was given to open to the female gaze, and in particular, the feminist gaze.

Today, if Röndal places the vague field of contemporary crafts as a region within the so-called bigger art world, she can interpret the Artist’s (“male”) gaze – as one who sees “textile art” as non-art, sissy-craft, harmless, ugly.

But by paying attention, she allows herself to be touched by life. The weaver’s gaze at the enormous weave of the dog is a gaze that understands textiles, understands yarn. The gaze is not contaminated by ideas about textiles as something feminine, everyday-ish, low-class, material-based, and kitschy. The dog is handwoven, a picture, similar to the tapestries of the old time, but executed in less elegant rya. An inbred cousin in other words – an old quilt mixed with a luxury tapestry.

The weaver’s gaze – does not take a sexist side next to the “artist”. She doesn’t see that her textile is art on an exception, as if quoted into a “free art collection” as the only work made out of textile.

Röndal wants to suggest that craft/textile artists recapture their own gaze as part of their bodily (tacit) knowledge. Reposition and upgrade the gaze, and her suggestion here is to explore ways of how this can be expressed.

Working with sound to destabilise conventions of masculinity and its transformative potential on the listener to acts of observing how a filmmaker works with his love of cinema, this session draws sound and image into a differentiated relationship and yet at the same time works with the transformative potentials in sonic and visual practice.

South African filmmaker Jahmil XT Qubeka has made three notable feature films as director: the school drama noir ‘Of Good Report’ (2013); the anti-apartheid Western ‘Sew the Winter to My Skin’ (2018); and the boxing crime drama ‘Knuckle City’ (2019). These films share a sense of aesthetic innovation and adventurous narration, while also suggesting Qubeka’s position as a cinephile. Cinephilia is a love of film, a pronounced affinity for the medium, which informs Qubeka’s work. Here, Qubeka is a ‘hunter-gatherer’ (by way of De Valck & Hagener (2005)) of images and sounds. My point of departure for this paper is that Qubeka’s films can be optimally encountered when we read his work as the filmmaker’s articulation of his own cinephilia.

Through close readings of the above three films, this paper firstly explains the parameters of the filmmaker as cinephile, and secondly sets out to identify the mechanisms of Qubeka’s cinephilia as captured in, for instance, his films’ intertextuality and citationality. This discussion of cinephilia will be anchored in the thought of scholars including Adrien Martin (1998; 2009; 2019); Jenna Ng (2010); and Jonathan Rosenbaum (2019). 

Finally, this paper will argue that this love of film becomes a primary mode of practice through which Qubeka responds to South African socio-political and historical issues coterminous with his affinity for South African and international filmmaking and film history. It is in this third instance that Qubeka’s cinephilia translates into politically acute, anti-nostalgic filmmaking. For this latter part of the paper, I will turn to Girish Shambu’s (2019) manifesto for a new cinephilia in which he foregrounds the political dimensions and activism in and of cinephilia.

In the audio-paper Fear of Weakness: Songs to Agitate the Man, Morten Poulsen builds on his project Boys Will Be… (2022), in which he met with young men to have conversations about vulnerability, intimacy and masculine norms. At the end of each meeting, Morten recorded the men giggling and these recordings were then presented as a sound installation at Errant Sound, Berlin DE. Listening back to the giggling men, and informed by both sound and gender studies, Morten explores the deficiencies of hegemonic masculinity and men’s fear of being exposed as non-masculine. How might an exhibition of intimacy and vulnerability disarmer the self-controlled hegemonic masculinity? How might the sound of giggling men serve as a noise in the patriarchal system?