WITH LOVE
de/re-construction of the loving discourse
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 — 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 didn’t find a vocabulary that was precise while spacious enough.
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. Further methods that are important in this process are storytelling, anecdotes and voice recordings of conversations and dreams.
Today, in a moment in time of ferocious changes in social structures, relations, and norms, I find that we are in need of understanding love again, and this calls for a reconsideration of its language.