11 Sep 2015

Studio sull'Amore | Border & Limit Performance by Laura Bartolomei

In the last few years, 'Exploring Affect' has been a disciplinary interest in feminist thought. Critical love studies have become the object of recent studies conducted in many research groups. Amongst those, some universities, like Goteborg in Sweden, have held a symposium about it. Such efforts have included developing philosophy of love, raising the philosophical question of love, referring both to the actual discipline of philosophy, the history of ideas and the theory of love formulated in social sciences 1).

Laura Bartolomei 'Studio sull'amore', developed independently in the same period, is a highly symbolic work, whose tension reaches out to wider fields, fit to unravel the Scandinavian word 'gräns/græns/grens', which comprises the meaning of the two English words 'border' and 'limit'; a notion which may be understood in a tangible or in a representational sense.

Suspended from the ceiling, struggling to find balance between love and gränser in fact, Laura Bartolomei prompts reflections on love as a broad sentiment, as a connection to concepts such as nation, race, ethnicity, migration and citizenship.

What is more, as imagination and love are not gendered notions 2), her Study on Love elicits questions like what is the role of discourses on love in the construction of limits / borders, as well as in terms of identity.

Laura Bartolomei draws a relationship between love and the construction of communities such as the family, the people and the nation, wondering about the place of love in narratives about migration, identity, and politics of race.

Feminist thought has worked with similar concepts and yet feminist art practice is arguably a controversial notion in Italy, occasionally fitting within the context of retrospective exhibits or special events but , interestingly, rarely within current festivals and fairs.

Studio sull'Amore is not overt feminist art, however, it does echo with almost rare boldness issues and themes that are rarely debated, perhaps avoided.

Within this dimension of private and public, a woman artist pushes the boundaries to understand more what love is, including the audience in a pursuit where the public becomes private and viceversa.

1 http://www.univie.ac.at/Geschichte/salon21/?p=18898
2 http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/1/131.short