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Performance

Florin Flueras ‘Love’

12/04/2024–14/04/2024

Love is based on Love Body (Second Body), a practice of adding an affective sensibility to everyday behaviours, a second attention that might make one drift out of the anatomic body towards a love body. Love body is not so much about the affect that comes from the body, but it is more about the body that comes from affect. The affect is producing and moving the body. The affective layer is primordial – the body is love. Love body might be similar to certain non-western ones – bodies as bundles of affects and capacities, that organise perspectives, worlds around them – bodies that through special practices affect reality. We don’t know what a love body can do. Affective metamorphosis of the body can get you into other worlds.

 

One simple way to activate the love body is via 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 primal 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’s kind of urgent to reactivate this sensibility and expand it to an embodied love, because nothing else seems to stop us from destroying everything. We might take care of the world more out of love than out of a rational “we have to.” – Florin Flueras

 

“Love” explores practices for embodying love – hypersensitivity, ecstatic affects, overwhelming feelings, subtle affective connections with things around… The sensitized love bodies are inserted in “inappropriate” contexts where something else is already happening – from art spaces to supermarkets and anything in between – adding an extra layer to their ordinary function. Audience mingles with people who are unaware of the performance. Meetings are produced between two types of audiences, attentions, situations, performers, two degrees of performing and experiencing. Because affects are contagious, the atmosphere can get love charged. Temporary zones of possibility might open. Artworks are usually visual, sound or conceptual. Love is affect based.

Florin Flueras about the piece

“One day in 2007, while mopping the floor I felt that by deviating from the usual presence, just by a shift in attention and intention, the ordinary activity radically transformed, as well as the body and reality. I entered a special awareness and sensibility state. I was amazed that states and presences that usually are achieved through somatic or performing practices are accessible just by adding an affective sensibility to everyday behaviors, a different attention. Instead of changing ourselves and developing new practices, we can add another, a second attention to what we already do.  

 

Our default attention creates a body as image, as instrument, and the attitude of control and instrumentalization of the body extends to nature and entire reality. Our bodies are impregnated with a biological conception, there is a scientific knowledge that we put automatically into bodies and objects. We just know that they are made of molecules and atoms not of affects, spirits, or something similar, we actually perfectly know what a body can do and what a body is. 

 

The 60s effort of setting free this tool-body was not enough, it ended in emptiness, and depressive, dissatisfying hedonism. The idea of liberating the body fell short. It’s not enough to “free the body”, you need to reconstruct the body and that’s a different kind of work.  In 2012, inspired by the body of the ‘internal night’ of Artaud, “the body without organs” of Deleuze, the body as a bundle of affects and capacities of Amazonians, the “dreaming body” of other cultures, I wanted to create a “second body” around a second, affective attention. A body not centered on images but on a special body sensibility that might pull us out of the anatomic body, affecting what is possible to see, think and do – a Second Body as affect, as medium, as a portal towards the unknown. 

 

In June 2012 Alina [Popa] joined me for an Unsorcery residency and presentation at Teatrul Spălătorie, Chișinău. And since then we have worked together in Unsorcery. We immersed ourselves in Second Body practice and conceptual work around it and we each wrote a text based on it. In her words, Second Body and Unsorcery are “a quest for a body that is not free as in the 1960s, not only deconstructed as in the seminal choreographic work of the 1990s, not only made into a provider of liveness and memory for the visitor to a contemporary art museum in the blooming experience economy of the 2000s.”

‘Love’ is part of ‘Refuge’ opening programme.

 

Supported by:

Lithuanian Council for Culture, Arc Bucharest and the Administration of the National Cultural Fund Romania