My research around love had a conscious start with: The solution is to convert them into highly digestible protein sources (Viviani 2019), a semi-autobiographic audio installation โ even though the majority of my previous works were somehow related to this interest. On one side there was a sort of love illiteracy, dragged from childhood into my adult life, and on the other, I was driven and fascinated by the understanding of this new feeling for which I didnโt find a vocabulary that was precise while spacious enough.
โLโamore comporta una difficoltaฬ dโespressione, di comunicazione, dato che cioฬ che si tratta di esprimere sono effetti, sensazioni e la sensazione si sottrae al linguaggio dando luogo a una sorta di afasiaโ [Love brings with it a difficulty of expression, of communication, since what is to be expressed are effects, sensations, and this sensation evades language giving rise to a kind of aphasia] (Barthes 2017). A big Object entered a vacant room, if I was previously unsure about what love is and how to navigate it, for sure the absence of it was occupying an interesting place inside me. I started reading more and less trivial books on the subject, listening to podcasts, be the confidant of friends and especially acquaintances. I started realizing that there was a common ground of confusion.
Love is elusive and rebellious to definition, and its propriety is to be expressed and not analyzed; for its essence is the one of a pure effect, an effect purified from all responsible reasons, the source of reason, and the ends itself.
In my PhD-project, I intend to deconstruct and reconstruct the vocabulary surrounding love.
As an artist, I use language as a tool to recreate narrations, both via text-based works in the form of audio drama (used as an umbrella term for songs, opera, poetry, or plays), and with visual representations (mainly sculptures and installations). These object-characters, take the place of the aphasic voice of the lover who does not know what else to do. The outcome is simply the result of the path. Understanding through making.
In my exploration of the vocabulary surrounding love, I aim to understand how different ways of knowing can be generated through artistic practice.
To surprise entities that are elusive to definitions, one needs to find new ways.
In preparation for this doctorate, I started visiting a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I felt it was a mandatory step I had to take before walking this path. In addition to that, I will attend a series of seminars designed to help develop a diverse toolbox needed to approach the field of relational intelligence. I will then activate workshops, open to voice-over actors and curious, together with a professional, using forms of psychodrama to unlock an initial safe space and test new possibilities, in order to develop a working methodology that influences and informs the writing of my scripts. โWhen we enter the role of another, especially someone whose perspective challenges us, we get closer to understanding one anotherโ (Perel 2021).
People love storytelling, some say we lost our tail while sitting around the fire, telling stories. Or at least thatโs what I heard from someone during a dinner a few months ago. Each method is important in its capacity to address a specific issue and anecdotes often place the role of modifiers. When I ask a question, and someone replies with an anecdote, it reveals often more of the understanding of the topic itself, than the actual fact, same is when I tell my story and you reply with yours, and somehow similar to my waking self trying to listen to and make sense of the stories that my asleep-self is trying to narrate me. Itโs a game of connecting hyperlinks, which can build webs of relations outside our own.
I started recording as soon as my phone allowed me to do so, it was a way to keep track of my dreams, then I moved to strangers in the streets, then conversations.
Recording comes from the Latin re- with a sense of โrestoreโ + cor from cordis โheartโ, bring back to the heart, as in the Italian ricordare โrememberingโ. Audio recording is an exercise on memory, since remembering and forgetting are at the base of โthinking ofโ: I think of someone because I had for some time forgotten them.
I start with the assessment that love is a revolutionary act.
In a moment in time of ferocious changes in structures, relations, and norms, I find that we are in need of understanding love again, and this calls for a reconsideration of its language.
The reconstruction of love opens to the future, not a future that is the tomorrow we assume as certain, a repetition of today and replication of the past, but a limitless future (Zambrano 2011). โAnd where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been beforeโ (Audre Lorde 1984). โRevolution doesnโt become poetic, poetry shatters itself in the process of becoming revolutionaryโ (Sean Bonney 2016).