Love Expanded Love Extended
Love Expanded Love Extended explores definitions of love in the plural form, its strategies of manifestation, intimacies, and forms of production, as well as the codes and conventions present in relationships, from the personal to the collective, human to non-human.
This study line evolved organically out of a series of public programs and more intimate conversations that can trace their initial thread of inspiration back to Dora García’s Revolution, fulfill your promise!, a film project examining the feminist legacy of Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik revolutionary and early feminist theorist. Under the term ‘comradely love’, Kollontai offered a vision of love separated from the confines of romantic exclusivity and re-articulated it as a key motivational and organizing principle intrinsic to future liberatory imaginaries. “Love”, as Kollontai said, “is a profoundly social emotion. Love is not in the least a private matter concerning only two loving persons: love possess a uniting element which is valuable to the collective”.
Love Expanded Love Extended wants to analyze and go beyond the idea of the sexual revolution for a possible post-patriarchal society and dig deeper into the concept of love to bring together different and expanded forms of union and cohabitation. Within this framework, Love Expanded Love Extended connects artists and artistic projects that explore through being, doing, and making, the practice and process of collective solidarity –of ‘comradely love’ in action.
As one of our Study Lines, Love Expanded Love Extended links programming across venues and platforms; traversing across ideas, publications, exhibitions, and texts, but also informing our own personal and shared understandings of comradeship and collaboration with our institutional partners, and neighbors.