Army of Love, PEI, Macba Barcelona, 2017. Photo: Dora García
Dora García: On Revolutionary Love as a possible commonality
Welcome to our higher seminars in Rethinking research practices in Art, Technology and Design. The seminar is co-organised with CuratorLab. Everyone is welcome to attend!
In 1961, Erving Goffman published Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, coining the term "total institution" as those institutions deciding everything about the life of those with residency within that institution (the inmates). And given the institution made all the decisions concerning the inmates' life, this naturally meant they did not decide anything about their own life.
The dismantling of the total institution and the restitution of the residents right to make decisions on their life lies at the centre of the fight for a more democratic psychiatric care. This struggle informs the most dystopian narratives written in the first half of the twentieth century, such as We, 1984, A Brave New World; where the total institution is the State, and the inmates are the citizens. In all of them, the State control over the residents' sexual life is imperative – to control sex is to control the world. Again, not so far from the total control that the total institution imposes on residents in psychiatric asylums, where the elimination of sexual impulses is a condition for "the cure".
Why is totalitarianism so obsessed with the sexual, private lives of citizens? Why is the path so narrow for the adequacy for sex and affection? It would seem as if love was a dangerous destabiliser. And indeed love and revolution has been acknowledged as a formidable pair.
Revolutionary love only happens between equals (Kollontai), but conversely, love equalises, liberates, and guarantees a person's worth.
With these considerations in mind, the project Army of Love started a couple of years ago, as a constituent community debating the implications of considering love a common, asking who is concerned with this form of commonality, and the paradoxical relations that derive from it.
Dora García is an artist based in Brussels and Barcelona. Garcías works are loosely scripted, open-ended stories, performances, and scenarios that analyse (and at times psychoanalyse) language’s impact on the social formation of identity. Creating spaces for intervention, her works negotiate the relationship between author and actor and audience and the public; a dynamic García characterises as “the one who speaks and the one who listens.” Borrowing elements of Joycean literature, Boalian theatre, and “unofficial” translations of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, García’s performances draws the visitors and the passersby into conversations, often without their awareness. Her work The Beggar’s Opera (2007), based on the character of Filch from John Gay’s 1728 opera and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), interfered with and contradicted the expectations of its participants in the city of Muenster, Germany. Garcia has represented Spain at the Venice Biennale. (From www.artsy.net/artist/dora-garcia-1)
To prepare for the seminar, please read:
• ANDREA GARCÍA-SANTESMASES – WHEN THE POLITICAL GETS PERSONAL
• McKenzie Wark on Charles Fourier's Queer Theory
Optional further reading:
• Le nouveau monde amoureux de Charles Fourier (pdf)
• Parody and Liberation in The New Amorous World of Charles Fourier by Jonathan Beecher
• Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle, Alexandra Kollontai, 1921