Love (2021) explores practices for embodying love by activating a hypersensibility and an affect based way of being – aiming a reverse of the control perspective that, with horrible consequences, extends from instrumentalizing the body to nature and the entire reality. Love Nature is an organic expansion of Love, centered on 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 feels urgent to activate 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".
In our
globalized culture, it's more and more difficult and ridiculous to
communicate with plants, fungi, animals and other beings. Beings become
more and more on the side of objects than subjects. We tend to see
ourselves and nature as complex matter organized according to the
physical laws. Through this perspective everything is objectivized, to
be analyzed, exploited and consumed. Even current ecology is more and
more about planning ways to instrumentalize and engineer nature, in
order to “save it”. Love Nature dissolves control and
instrumentalization, changing 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.
Love Nature takes the form of
performance-workshops in which the Love Nature sensibility is activated
in our bodies, bodies that then are re-inserted in communities doing
their everyday, “normal” activities, but with a Love Nature extra layer.
This sensibility might appear exaggerated, strange, abnormal, puzzling.
The contrast that this hypersensibility brings might performatively
interfere with the normality of those contexts, expanding their
possibilities and limits, at least temporarily. Because affects are
contagious, Love Nature can spread. Artworks are usually visual, sound
or conceptual. Love Nature is affect based.
Notes from inside Love Nature - documentation as text
Love Nature in Refuge exhibition at Sapieha Palace Vilnius (2024)
