Mystery Of Love

MYSTERY OF LOVE Gathering program about erotic sphere of life

02/09/2018

06/09/2018

Multiple venues

Palermo

“Love is not a miracle… It’s an art, a skill, a mental and physical exercise of the mind and of the senses like any other. Like playing an instrument, dancing or woodworking.” (The Art of Joy, Goliarda Sapienza). Each year E.M.M.A experiments artistic means and methods on a particular concern by developing a roaming public program of artistic research in different venues and cities. This time, the inaugural communal gathering of the annual program takes place in the city of Palermo understood as a ground, an inspiration and a subject itself. Entitled MYSTERY OF LOVE and in search for the erotic sphere of life, the gathering program is thought as a practice to study together on the same topic and to imagine scenarios collectively, while learning from distinct methods and disciplines. It will explore and trigger politics of body and desire by proposing a serie of visits and meetings and a speculation practice around love and pleasure through cultural material, history, places, humans and legends.

PROGRAM:

Sunday 2nd
Landing at Ballaró market

Monday 3rd
2pm, Guided visit at Magazzino Brancaccio with Valentina Sansone (curator). Magazzino Brancaccio is a space devoted to contemporary art, experimental music and performance. The warehouse is located in a 2000 square meters property, confiscated from organized crime and opened to the public for the first time on June 16th, 2018, almost twenty years after its seizure. Today it represents a new permanent service for the neighborhood and the city.
4pm, Spazio Speciale (two artist’s studios, Luca Cutrufelli and Ignazio Mortellaro / A temporary gallery, VR Project Room, curated by Vittorio Rappa):
Sophie Mallett, Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love
Taking as a starting point Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, Sophie Mallett will establish links between the borders, the sovereignty and the whiteness and examine the relationships between the “anti-immigrant populism” and the “antiracist love”. Sophie will present an ongoing research National Anthems and her current body of work Our Gelatinous Past. National Anthems is an artistic research project which explores ideas of capital and migration through the tropes of Nationalism, and which re-imagines the idea of a national anthem in a supposedly globalised present. Our Gelatinous Past is a speculative docufiction where jellyfishes are cast as the protagonists of a new era in geopolitics : global warming has disrupted ocean currents and their dependent trade routes, halting the economic relationships that bind and separate the UK. It is a video about the UK, its sense of place (inspired by Doreen Massey’s text ‘A Global Sense of Place’) and the domination UK citizens are accustomed to, as custodians of the Empire’s heritage.
Raul Hott, The Affective Experience Experience (from Spanish vivencia) can be thought of as an artistic medium, as an essential form of knowledge and as a fundamental learning method. An architecture (experience) to intensify life, which encourages cooperation in order to re-establish our collective, social and biological systems. Three built environments and collective experiences will be shared during this presentation: ‘The Open Body’ in New York (2013), ‘La Unión’ in Chile (2016) and ‘The Great Arousal’ in Athens (2017). In the first two cases, experiences were strengthened and amplified through the use of music and dance. The maximum goal of these projects is to trigger awareness and joy in the participants. This meta-architecture can potentially set parameters and conditions for developing affection in different ranges and forms. The current research called ‘The Great Arousal’, overcomes the libido-lessening effects of the financial crisis. It is an exploration of how our own desire is capable of being extended towards new places; a great cooperation that promotes a deeper and more loving relationship between visible and non-visible entities, and erotic non-human beings. Through the use of new and alternative methods of perception, this practice becomes a tool to enable human beings to interact with different extensions of daily reality.

Leonor Serrano Rivas, The Castle Of Crossed Destinies

The Castle Of Crossed Destinies consists on a group gathering around the ideas presented in the work The Dream Follows the Mouth (of the one who interprets it). We will be using a diagram, a “script” to approach the main ideas of the work. This presentation strikes a chord with the theories of dramatists Gordon Craig and Heinrich von Kleist. Von Kleist, in his essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, claimed that puppets move with more grace and freedom than humans because they can “never slip into affectation.” According to von Kleist, affectation appears when the soul locates itself at any point other than in the centre of gravity of the movement, which is the point that the puppeteer can control. As such, given that the puppeteer controls the centre of gravity, “the limbs are what they should be; dead, pure pendulums following the simple law of gravity, an outstanding quality that we look for in vain in most dancers.” In this session we will be facing two inter-twisted pieces : the work presented and the stage where it is performed. In this way, the audience enters the stage. Ground/figure, actor/spectator; stage/choir might get ultimately reversed.

Tuesday 4th
10am, guided visit at Radiceterna. Radiceterna Arte Ambiente is a new and permanent public library, with an adjacent temporary exhibition space, within the Calidarium of the Botanical Gardens, part of the Museums System (SiMUA) of the University of Palermo. A project whose objective is to offer students and the wider public of the Botanical Gardens a place for the study of Art and of Nature.
11am, guided visit at Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum Since its foundation, the Museum has constantly pertained to contemporary museography and has not just been a temple of knowledge for a few people but a place for spreading culture and knowledge. The combination of traditional museum activities and the organization of live theatrical shows is at the basis of one of the most successful examples of museum research on theatre.

5pm, Crezi.Plus/Cantieri della Zisa:

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Love Sapienza
“A centuries-old message from my depths, it warned me to guard against myself, and go running in the sun“. Those are words written between 1967 and 1976 by the Sicilian writer Goliarda Sapienza in The Art of Joy. They mean a lot to me, it is hard to explain why. They make me cry these days. Do they mean a lot to you as well? I would need to tell you so many stories, I would need to watch so many films and look at so many images with you to explain why they touch me so deeply. But maybe you know what I am talking about. I found those words in a book of a life, written by a woman who lived her life more than making a living. Wait…By the way, why do we say “make a living?” to talk about how we actually survive in a world of neofascist politics and destroyed nature? Well, it’s time, let’s talk about love, or let’s talk about how we improvise with our feelings and the feelings of the ones next to us. How we disagree and how we desire, how we debate. As for myself, I feel lost. And I could share this loss with you. And I am happy to share what I love with you, as if talking about what matters was a deviance, in this city, in this margin, on this island that once made me love life more than in any other place in the world.

Wednesday 5th
From 11am onwards, Teatro Garibaldi, meeting with Chiara Cartuccia (coordinator) and free visit at Manifesta biennial.

Thursday 6th
Debriefing and departure

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Acknowledgment: Magazzino Brancaccio (Valentina Sansone), Spazio Speciale (Ignazio Mortellaro/Luca Cutrufelli/Vittorio Rampa), Radice Eterna (Valentina Bruschi, Ignazio Mortellaro, Vittorio Rampa), Crezi.Plus/Cantieri della Zisa (Cristina Alga)