Project
The Empire of Love: Alternative Relationships and Other Possibilities
The International Queer/Cuir V
The Empire of Love: Alternative Relationships and Other Possibilities
Valand Academy, Glashuset, University of Gothenburg
January 25, 2015
Activists, artists and thinkers will deliver performative presentations about the ways in which affective, emotional, love and friendship relationships are affected by normative approaches to equality and justice common to mainstream LGBTI politics internationally. In a time when sexual rights have largely come to signify marriage rights and a panoply of social benefits become available to those same sex couples that ratify their commitment in the eyes of the State, what forms of relating have been overlooked, ignored or declared illegitimate?
From a critical perspective accepting to the legalizing power of the State may jeopardize personal and collective freedoms in profound ways that influence society and culture, what are these consequences? How does one feel love? How does one experience heartbreak or loss? Are feelings also regulated by bourgeois normativity? Can a space of affective and critical resistance be reclaimed? Can we return to communality, marginality, promiscuity, broader notions of the family, non-binary relations, etc. as “respectable” ways of life? What is an alternative relationship? Are there other possibilities?
The symposium is organized by Valand Academy, Röda Sten Konsthall and The Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg in the context of Carlos Motta's mid-career survey exhibition Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love at Röda Sten Konsthall, January 24 - March 22, 2015
