"If you think love is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God." (Toni Morrison)
An encounter is by nature dichotomous, as it is both a meeting and a clash. It is fleeting, unexpected, sometimes life altering. Like love.
Love, philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains, is one such encounter. It is unpredictable and, when it occurs, is extra-ordinary, causing a sudden shift, after which nothing is the same again.
This eruption, is the moment of the ‘fall’ in love. This sense of falling, both dramatic and traumatic, is today being lost, replaced by pret-porter constructions of what love is allowed to be, look or feel like. People are choosing distance over the insane, inexplicable, provocative ‘fall’.
Love, in its bodily presence, is intended as lust, desire, fantasy, disgust, alienation, abandonment. It is the meta-physical space where wo/man is both human and savage at once.
The second edition of Sensorium invites a series of investigations into this conflictual terrain, where the viewer is confronted with the notion of love and its various declinations. Thus, is it possible that the reexists love before it is cultivated, cultured and codified? What happens when it is removed from the human ecosystem that defines it?
-Leandré D’Souza
