love_potion
Making intimate places through 'everyday performances' calls for a fragilising and making vulnerable of the self, and creates a potential for healing within that which Bracha Ettinger has termed the Matrixial sphere. Encountering without attempting to assimilate, master, control or reject the other, everyday performane artworks draw on that part of the human psyche that evades commodification and resists colonisation.
love_potion is an everyday, distributed performance artwork in three phases that uses borage herbs, seeds, magic spells, aural-visual trans-narratives and DIY installations. There is no single focus to love_potion rather it weaves several elements together that simultaneously exist in different places and across different times. Some aspects of the work can be performed in a gallery whilst other aspects are performed at home. Knowledge and memories of one element are transported across to another and back again.
love_potion uses only the most fragile protocols to draw attention to everyday performance spaces and situations.
The first phase of the performance takes place over six months and involves seeding, tending, harvesting and drying borage herbs. It was first carried out by the artists as an everyday activity and subsequently transformed through repetition and ritual into a form that can be shared with others.
The second phase involves preparing a magic potion from borage, an herb that reputedly drives away sorrow and melancholy, uplifts the spirits, and when shared with others nurtures compassion and peace. For Bracha L. Ettinger 'compassion [..] works its way, like art does, by fine attunements that evade the political systems'.
The third phase is where performers come together to co-create and co-tend an intimate place filled with aural-visual trans-narratives that can be downloaded from the glorious ninth website. When performers leave the shared space they take with them borage flowers and seeds with the intention of making new intimate spaces to share with others. As more people take part, there is potential for an invisible network of love to co-emerge.