––––Ghent, Belgium
We are doing an artistic residency at Vooruit for a new project, The present is not enough. We work on publicity campaigns, on the non-monetary exchange of sex in public spaces, on a particular gay masculinity, on forms of relationships that we - as lesbians and women - are excluded from, on bodily postures we haven't experienced and that in our eyes can become a utopia, on how to create possible futures on stage, on an archive of shots, images, fragments and ghosts of the New York Piers scene of the 1980s, on flickering worlds (a word that Nina gifted us), which is also the flickering of the black, murky waters of the Hudson, on the fullness preceding the loss, which back then came in the shape of the AIDS pandemic, on that fullness that is a past becoming the future again, on a warm night full of strangers, on the queer that isn't here yet, on surfacings and nameless intensities. We work with the words and the images of David Wojnarowicz, José Esteban Muñoz, Samuel Delany, Olivia Laing, Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop, Jack Halberstam and others. We are with Ondina, Fede, Gabriele and Giacomo - Tony will arrive next week. Nina comes from Brussels in the first few days we are alone, and together we have a lesson with the students of KASK.
We blend bodies, desires and frequencies coming from other temporalities. We imagine abandoned warehouses, crumbling buildings, luminous bodies under the sun, free and wild urban spaces.
On 24 February, at dawn, Russia invades Ukraine. The war breaks out, And the world as we have known it these past decades, in Europe, seems on the verge of collapse.