ove archive is a year long documentation and research project aiming to find out how people love in todays society. We will be interviewing people on the streets of Germany, visiting places where love exists.
The ideal of romantic love, the complete fusion of two people is in us, in our minds, our bodies and our dreams. But in modernity, the self-efficacy of the western world as a collective social formation is vast. Each of us is calibrated to understand ourselves as an autonomous person. Until exhaustion, lovers now balance between freedom and commitment: love is increasingly perceived as a frustrating way of managing individual needs and desires.
The utopia of the physical and emotional intimacy of two people is now turning into a new reality in which e-sex is normal and almost all sexuality traded on the market becomes commercial. Everyone guessed it. The couple relationship - in whatever form - does not guarantee a safe hiding place anymore. But what is perceived as a great loss of longings and expectations of many may also bring something new.
The dissolution of morally traditional boundaries, the strong rejection of violence and the tendency to voluntarily relationship and sexuality have a large and positive share in this social change. Desire and sex in old age, the right to a relationship and the sexual desire of women over 50, homosexual forms of relationships fully visual in everyday society and active polygamous relationships are strong expressions of a new perception and recognition of the physical and of new relationship models. Even asexuality - as the Berlinale-winning film 2018 Touch me not has shown - is authentically anchored in society and solved by the pathological.
Maybe real flesh and blood analogy will be so overcome by the fear of being hurt. Maybe in the future we will prefer a digital life, eradicating the pain of love and striving for self-optimisation without physical as we know it today. Or maybe the realisation that only contact from another person makes us aware of our existence and becomes the most important element to any kind of love relationship ... ?
With the LoveArchive I would like to artistically explore which forms of love we live today. I want to deepen my work by asking people of different ages and/or perspectives about their personal experiences and thoughts about love relationships. Furthermore, discussions, street observations, discourses, literature collections, personal reports and love letters are part of the research.
Through choreography and performance I will address the complexity of human desire and love expression. I will share my research results here on this website as a kind of 10 months diary with the aim of getting a better picture of how we love today and what a love might look like in the near future.
Karolin Stächele (DAGADA dance company) is a dancer, performer and choreographer based in Freiburg, Germany. Artistically she is interested in the subject of self-positioning within society with much of her work focussed specifically on the intersection between shame and beauty.
You can follow my observations and experiences here in my blog. I will not only publish artistic outputs but also share personal thoughts and interesting links about the topic. The goal of this particular research is to capture the sociological diversity of the love theme and to follow new paths in interpersonal relationships.
Supported by Kulturamt Freiburg and the Landesverband Freie Tanz- und Theaterschaffende Baden-Württemberg e.V. with funds from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg.
In cooperation with E-WERK Freiburg / Galerie für Gegenwartskunst and Cross Attic Prague.
A production of the DAGADA dance company.