Guest post: Lisa Alexander | Provocation for TO YOU TO YOU TO YOU: Love Letters to A (Post)Europe
14th September 2018
Since then borders inside and outside have grown backwards in time. A clock that’s stopped can fool us for it shows the correct time twice a day. New languages have been created for these borders based on malappropriating old words. Our enemies were once the distant cousins we gave shelter to after a long journey. Is it possible to decolonise memory that halts the ability to dream? Fifty years on from 1968 and Liberty just published A Guide to the Hostile Environment. The world’s seas are privatised by businessmen and kleptocrats. Walls are being built again. Privilege is superficially fixed for the few. Austerity is a lie as debts can never be paid off but what if debt becomes a journey, a search for ways of being with each other? the soul’s dark summits are non-negotiable.
Love is political, love is a philosophy. With love there’s room for warmth and dissonance and freedom of movement. To see the horizon or be a grain of sand on the shoreline. To be singular and multiple, sing songs of unfixing or reparation, cast spells of decolonization and seduction.
This event asks artists to gather and to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter. Of now. It may also be ending it. An action approaching another, a double listening.
Lisa Alexander
Artists will respond to this provocation as part of TO YOU TO YOU TO YOU: Love Letters to A (Post)Europe programme:
4 Oct | TO YOU TO YOU TO YOU Book Launch hosted by Live Art Development Agency with an evening of discussion and open letters. Book your seat here.
5&6 Oct | TO YOU TO YOU TO YOU: Love Letters to a (Post)Europe, Artsadmin, London. An urgent gathering of love and dissent that seeks to connect, exchange and witness through performance and assembly, and through the action, idea or form of a love letter. Artists | Fri 5th: Brian Catling & David Tolley, ESKA, Tim Etchells (video short), Catherine Hoffmann, Mikhail Karikis (video short), Claire MacDonald, Ivana Müller, Daniel Oliver, Florence Peake, Maria Sideri / Sat 6th: Kate Adams, Dean Atta, Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir, Season Butler, Robin Deacon, Matthew Goulish & Lin Hixson, Brian Lobel, Erica Scourti (video short), Marikiscrycrycry, Nikki Tomlinson. Further artists to be announced. Book your tickets here
12 Oct | Open Letter Gathering at The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, Liverpool
Performance gatherings at:
17 Oct | The Arts Centre at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk
10 Nov | ]performance space[ Folkestone
Read Lisa’s interview with performingborders (December 2016) here
Featured image credits: Yoko Tawada at Love Letters to a (Post-) Europe curated by Lisa Alexander, Athens, 2015. Image: Eftychia Vlachou
