The Living School

February 14 – 16, 2022 / 19:00 – 22:00

Art Academy – Møllendalsveien 61, Bergen / with Marianna Dobkowska, Brandon LaBelle, and Gentian Meikleham

For the fifth gathering of The Pirate Academy, we focus on the topic of Love. Is love a potential framework for challenging capitalistic power, to reorient labor by way of cooperation, festivity, the pursuit of hobbies, or even loafing around? Can love become a currency that leads away from exchange value and towards relational value? If in moving our labors in the direction of love, do understandings of labor change – does labor shift towards an idea of craft or art, if we consider a broader understanding of an “art of living” in which work, care, relationships, and doing are brought together? And what of the loss of love, love as connected to grief, sympathy, and the mysterious and profoundly interruptive experience of a broken heart?

Through such perspectives, we’ll delve into love as a deeply human experience and capacity, as something that traverses across cultures and societies, and that also moves us toward other species: love as a planetary relational power. This will include exploring gestures of care and hospitality, where love extends us beyond closed intimacy toward a sense of responsibility for others, as well as practices of craft and curating, where a relation to materials, things, knowledge, lend to the formation of “techniques” – from handcraft, and the careful handling of things, to the organizing and initiating of social and cultural contexts, where works and people are gathered and housed within a considered framework. Love, in this regard, is never only about romance, rather, it forms the basis for movements of togetherness.

Monday, February 14 / 19:00 – 22:00: introductory thoughts and perspectives by Brandon LaBelle on the topic of Love, thinking through love as a transformative power and experience, from the deeply overwhelming and overturning experience of falling in love to the bonding of friendships, family and partnerships – and further, to love as what may move us towards radical sharing: as Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues, love “deprivatizes emotion”; love is put forward as a power that manifests in “communist affection”, challenging systems that emphasize individualism and the private self //// Such perspectives will be extended with a presentation by our guest, Marianna Dobkowska, a curator based in Warsaw. For the Pirate Academy Marianna will share her experiences and thoughts gathered throughout the years of work as a residency curator at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and her recent projects such as Re-Directing: East X Empathic Pedagogies – Future Intimacies and Konteksty: Postartistic Congress in Sokołowsko, which are relational, educational and transdisciplinary formats of collective learning and unlearning. In her presentations and proposed activities she will draw attention to overlooked but crucial components of artistic and curatorial practice such as: tenderness, intimacy, kindness, hospitality and love.

Tuesday, February 15 / 19:00 – 22:00: We continue exploring Love with a presention by our guest Gentian Meikleham, an artist and writer based in Scotland whose works address questions of love and loss, mourning and the poetic residues left behind – Gentian will invite us into her practice, sharing her performative, sculptural and textual craft, which will open onto reflections on how love relates to artistic practice: in what ways is love present in the studio, and in the position (or disposition) of being an artist? We will continue these reflections by following some proposed activities and stories by Marianna Dobkowska, where we’ll come together to relax, to take care of ourselves, allowing us to come closer to love as an embodied experience and intelligence.

Wednesday, February 16 / 19:00 – 22:00: to conclude this edition of the Pirate Academy, we’ll explore love through the topic of Sympathy, understanding sympathy as an emotional, affective capacity and that underpins what Francisco Varela terms “ethical know-how” – a sort of “crazy wisdom” by which we respond to others, especially those in struggle; sympathy is posed as what moves us, and what places one’s body within a greater web of relations //// we’ll follow sympathy, finally, into a collective act of “musical improvisation”, led by Gentian Meikleham: exploring objects, things, materials, and the acoustics of the room, we’ll make sounds together, listening and attuning to a collective space outside of language, where feeling, touch, rhythm and resonance become guiding material currents: this final act of love, one that we give to ourselves and each other, found in crafting a collective scene of movement and shared gestures, may help remind how art making is a labor of love, and what it may express is an intensifcation of critical joy.

“Power requires sad bodies, power needs sadness, in order to dominate. Joy, therefore, is Resistance, because she does not give up. Joy, as a power of life, takes us to places where sadness would never take us…” – Gilles Deleuze