LIEBEN

Johan Grimonprez, Astrid Klein, Eva Schlegel, titre provisoire

Loving, as a verb, as action, can be a political force. To love offers the potential for change. To love can be to experience oneself as a plurality and to open oneself to other pluralities, to affirm links and frontier disruptions. In loving we may bring forth unsuspected interrelationships with others in ourselves without building a new unity in the process.

Yet when loving remains mired in the number 2, its revolutionary power is extinguished. When the number 2 is conceived as the heterosexual matrix of love, then dominance emerges, engendering power politics in the germinal cell of the relationship between two people and stabilizing it within society as a whole: the one desires and the other offers herself to be loved (Astrid Klein).

Loving is complicated—desire, the unconscious, the analyst, the added value and the organs, all of which enter the stage to interact, all of which are entangled with social policy and tend to reproduce it (titre provisoire). When we conceive of ourselves as a 1, as a single self-enclosed unity that exists because it has the capacity to think, we fail to recognize that we are ourselves only in relation to others (Johan Grimonprez).

Perhaps we should begin with wild kissing (Johan Grimonprez) and enter an uncontrollable space in which we can no longer locate the floor beneath our feet, no longer draw the horizon line or experience ourselves as autonomous selfhoods (Eva Schlegel). A beautiful risk, but one we should dare to take, for it will not be easy: “On the one hand, a political love must be a revolutionary force that radically breaks with the structures of the social life we know, overthrowing its norms and institutions. On the other hand, it must provide mechanisms of lasting association and stable social bonds and thus create enduring institutions.” (Michael Hardt)

Curated by Nina Tabassomi

Press contact:
Dr. Lena Nievers
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