Texts

LUV is messy, a can ‘o worms

… NO, rather a diorama encasing the heart, leaf, spaceship, firefly, hummingbird & ankh, symbols that advance its plot.

1. The HEART symbol came first. It was carved into a tree at the same time as the words, Luv ‘til it Hurts. The spelling of luv was changed forever, and the buxom HEART became a megaphone–pumping loudly and emitting reverberations. Desirous of speed, its incumbent pangs, swarm-like, fragment into projectiles before taking flight.

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Originally HIV2020 was to be held in Mexico City as an alternate meeting to AIDS2020 that was to be held in San Francisco. The biennial AIDS conference is a big show, and cities compete to host it for its business. There’s a tenet of the meeting that it alternates between ’north’ and ‘south’ countries. AIDS2018 was in Amsterdam, but for some reason the decision that it be in San Francisco was made, which in turn gave rise to HIV2020. Luv ’til it Hurts was launched at AIDS2018 with a postcard series by the artist Kairon Liu and his project, Humans as Hosts. And, since it’s a two-year project (at first), we have a major milestone now two years later as both AIDS2020 and HIV2020 go totally online due to COVID19.

When I first put out tent pegs for Luv ’til it Hurts (LUV), I framed it as a two-year period of R&D. The duration of the R&D is the (art) work. This is because I could guarantee to perform ‘research and development’ for a period that I determine duration. I aimed the process at a concept loosely termed ‘philanthropic device’, and then somewhere on this axis where process (asking questions / meeting people while focused on a theme) ‘meets’ identifiable / achievable structure or agglomeration of activities (culmination), I’ve been watching and nudging, teasing out and archiving the ensuing form. And, of course the ending can be the beginning of something else. If something substantive and/or timely comes out of this two-year marathon, I’ll see it. The period is up at end of June, and I’m on a keen outlook for what emerges. It might need new words to describe it, as it shouldn’t be run-of-the-mill. It will be clear soon. Of that, I’m sure. 

[*When the project began, I wrote a piece entitled Why Make an Open Work? where I used some borrowed ‘game storming’ graphics to show the chaos needed within a project before it comes to a point. This logic showed up again when Adham Bakry made LUV’s first design elements (see image). While I don’t imagine that an art exhibition is the only ‘point’ of LUV’s two-year period of understanding, it does seem very compelling as we near the end of its initial two-year period. Codename: Exquisite Corpse! xo Todd]

Game of Swarms will be thus a communication device as well as a register of the artistic research upon how dynamics of networks in nature can be used as a tool to understand new ways of relationality among humans and non-humans—based on the distribution of agency, rather than the centralisation of powers.

***

Collaboration is often considered a value, but not a standard behaviour in Western societies, as much of their thinking is rooted in the individualistic view of the subject—based on autonomy and self-determination. Game of Swarms is an artistic investigation and communication device that offers an alternative to that exceptional framework of the human, emphasising the collaborative behaviour of systems in nature.

Could Be The Ballroom was always our Nuclear option
A rock scrabble bunker become a threshing floor
How we survived our Coldest War

A Mother a Father an entire house full of babies
tucked into mangers woven out of street corner filament
limber enough to parent those of us:

born with and with out parents
with and without islands

begat inside flags with and without stripes
while reading for A-level exams

*Spanish below

EN

LTIH: Do you prefer being called Sergio or El Santo? 

ES: You can call me anything, I like both, Sergio is the name that my parents gave me, and El Santo is the name that I gave to my work, I’ll tell you a little bit more about the story of El Santo.

I believe it is important to start by telling you that when I was very little my mother would scold me, saying in an ironic way: “you are a saint, you never do anything, absolutely nothing.” Hehehe. In our culture saints are important, and I confess that ever since I was a little boy I really liked the idea of saints as characters, beyond the religious, I like to think that there can exist beings with some type of magic power or presence, with a sensibility that can change things, make things, or achieve things. In religion, saints, and even God himself, are like superheroes who give their all for a better world. I think it is very beautiful for one to believe in something, and even to believe in something in order to live. So I got the idea that the saint could be this character that lives in me and that is manifested through art and drawing. Because I need to believe in him, in something.
And I believe that that is how the story of this character, or trademark, started in my art… And my saint really has fulfilled me, because I feel like, and I always tell my students, that I live the best version of Sergio, doing what I like best. 

[*In February and back before Covid19 suspended travel (and life as we knew it) a group of LUV peeps met in NYC to work on the ’next-LUV’ or an afterlife for Luv ’til it Hurts, a project that I originally charted for only two years. Those two years are almost up. We received some instruction/planning questions from teammate Jakub Szczęsny at that time, and again now as a new group plan takes shape. xo Todd]

Brainstorming in New York at the Goethe Institut

[*From February 9-11, 2020, Luv ’til it Hurts was busy in NYC. LUV participated in Love Positive Women (a project by Jessica Lynn Whitbread) with a poetry and food-inspired event ‘LUV YEMANJÁ’. Food and a series of handmade porcelain candles were offered by artist Thiago Gonçalves and poet Brad Walrond offered a version of his work ‘1986’ paired with other poems to suit the occasion. On the following two days, a group including Jakub Szczęsny, Eric Rhein, Todd Lester, Brad Walrond, Paula Nishijima, Paula Querido Van Erven worked on the hopeful next phase of the LUV project. Within this process were statements describing the project from individual viewpoints, such as this one by Brad. xo Todd]

[*After some meetings in NYC in February (2020), the LUV team set about a visioning process that should yield the project’s next phase–with a new level of clarity–by the middle of the year. We asked Brad Walrond to help us come up with a new introductory text (something like an artist statement), and we are gonna hold this back until we launch the next LUV. However, in our recent consensus-building process, Brad Walrond, Paula Nishijima and I all wrote (from where we were stood at that moment) about LUV. Here’s mine. xo Todd]