Lecture Performance | Six Days of Love
Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love
Edna Bonhomme and Obaro Ejimiwe
Pallavi Paul, Out of Date (series), 2018-2021. Courtesy: the artist
The Persian poet Rumi once surmised, “Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.” The statement has a particular resonance for individuals and communities who navigate a world that is particularly hostile and is an affirmation that no matter one’s status, love is possible. Indeed, love is a magnet for emancipation, feeding the soul and flesh of people throughout the world. This lecture performance will be an open invitation to actively reflect on non-European notions of love through poetry, prose and ritual. Starting from the vantage point of Erzulie, the Haitian Voodoo spirit of love, this event will focus on the liberatory potential of love as it extends to the global subaltern.
The public programme Six Days of Love follows the trajectory in How Love Moves: Prelude with a series of cinematic readings, conversational formats and workshops between summer 2023 and spring 2024. In intimate settings at the freely accessible areas of the Gropius Bau and the cinema, Six Days of Love invites visitors to turn to love as a field of signs beyond the normative mould, through the lens of poetry and the cinematic. The programme brings together different vantage points of writers, scientists, artists and musicians, drawing from a poem by author and activist bell hooks published in When Angels Speak of Love (2005), circling around love as a planetary language premised on minuscule and monumental aspects of the body and the worlds it inhabits.