Love is Strong as Death

When Hyla Willis, my subRosa partner, and I first visited the Brown University campus after being invited to contribute a work to the Installation show (In Transit: From Object to Site) we noticed a clocktower, the “Carrie Tower” in a corner of the College Green. It was commissioned and dedicated by one of the Founders of Brown to his wife Carrie, and bore the inscription: “Love is Strong As Death.” This well-known quote from the Song of Songs of the Old Testament became our inspiration. We wanted to make a work that was contingent, not monumental, not “lasting”, but vulnerable, risky, fragile yet strongly desiring--as life itself. The political landscape of the world is horrifying, the US war governs the nations, wreaking havoc, death, famine and pestilence. In the name of democracy unspeakable acts are perpetrated daily on women, children, soldiers, animals, nature, and cities. What is a democracy that demands such atrocities and hate? How can such means ever create viable civic life? Who cares for the mothers, the children, the youth forced into armed service, the animals and plants slaughtered, the cities bombed and burned? In the face of this how can we assert that Love is Strong as Death? How can we even mention the word “love” in the name of which terrible betrayals and violence on a personal and public level are done every day?

subRosa discussed our project with these questions in mind. We thought about Luce Irigaray’s writing about friendship and love between women and the need for civic rights for women and children. We thought about Judith Butlers’ recent writing about gender violence, and what makes a viable life, a life worth living. We thought about the practices of hosting, welcoming difference, welcoming the stranger, that we had learned about from our own collective artistic practice, from friends like Irina Aristarkhova, and from feminists like bell hooks and Audrey Lord. subRosa has tried to ground its practice in ideas about conviviality, desire, pleasure, and welcoming difference. We decided to make our work at Brown a kind of image of our practice. We would invite people from the University and the surrounding community, as well as from subRosa’s larger network of female affiliation, to join us in a discursive, performative, embodied experience of welcoming, hosting, conviviality and discourse expanding on the topic of “Love is Strong as Death.”

From that moment of beginning the project, everything we did became part of the project: Making invitations, compiling lists of addresses, emailing with friends and strangers; inviting people to help us; finding a feminist organic farmer to supply the food; arranging accommodation for traveling friends, thinking about the form of the feast, the menu, researching and reading, meeting with people at Brown. The project has moved from object to site to action or performance.

After some internal conversations with a few friends, we are now ready to open the blog conversation to participation. We wish to engage in a thoughtful, unrepressed, and critical conversation about love and friendship, the differences between them, how they might have very different meanings for women than for men, how sisterhood may be a very different model than brotherhood, how the concept of a “politics of friendship” can be an act of political love, how democracy and a viable civic/civil life can be brought about when there is such war on difference; and how does our practice change us and teach us?

We invite you to participate.

(Faith Wilding, subRosa)

We have linked this project to a project begun 3 years ago by Irina Aristarkhova and Faith Wilding. It is an on-going project in which we try to interrogate our ideas and practice of friendship as a shared and public project, as well as offering a testimony to the fact that friendship between women is possible (we hope). The short text below was written to introduce the on-line conversation between Irina and Faith.

Introduction to Irina Aristarkhova and Faith Wilding’s Project: Love and Friendship: The Spaces Between Us. Exhibited in “Windstoesse”(Windgusts), Kunsthaus, Dresden, 2003:

Friendship and Love are among the cornerstones of our existence (AT LEAST THEY SHOULD BE?) Friendship is the ideal mixture of closeness and distance and promises continuity, acceptance THROUGH SINCERITY, solidarity THROUGH RESPECT FOR DIFFERENCE beyond instrumentalized bonds (such as marriage, work partnerships, etc. )LOVE EVOKES SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS AND INTIMATE, HIDDEN AND UNCONDITIONAL. BOTH ARE CULTURALLY SPECIFIC AND HENCE POSE A QUESTION OF LOCAL SENSIBILITIES AND OPENNESS TO WONDER. However, are the conditions for love and friendship still the same in these days of extreme mobility, travel, migration, virtual connections, gender turmoil, sexual competition, and continuous reinvention of identity? (SUBJECTIVITY INSTEAD OF IDENTITY? –FOR VARIOUS REASONS, SO AS TO KEEP THE DOOR OPEN TO DIFFERENCE, NOT ONLY TO IDENTIFICATION)? Yes, subjectivity then.

Irina Aristarkhova & Faith Wilding
Spaces Between Us