19 January 2017, 17:00–21:00 / Casco HQ
If you would like to attend our Army of Love introductory event on Thursday 19 January, please make a reservation by Monday 16 January.
For those visiting Casco – Office for Art, Design & Theory for the first time, it might be useful to understand accessibility in our beautiful but challenging building:
– Due to the steps leading to the entrance way and the building’s internal staircases, Casco is not currently wheelchair accessible. We are working towards making Casco an accessible space for wheelchair users in the future.
– The bathroom is a single stall.
– Our mediation material is available in both English and Dutch and our events are typically spoken in English, unless otherwise noted.
Please contact us if you will need some extra help and we can assist you to visit our exhibitions and attend the many events in our multifarious program.
Army of Love introductory event, screening, discussion, exercises, open call, with Ingo Niermann and Dora Garcia, as well as the presentation of Ingo Niermann’s Solution series and its latest publication Complete Love, at San Serriffe, Amsterdam on Wednesday 18 January 2017 at 20:00 hrs
Welcoming 2017 with radical, unconditional love towards comprehensive justice, the evolving and expanding super group Army of Love will begin their intra-organizational relationship with Casco – Office for Art, Design & Theory with an introductory event with novelist Ingo Niermann and artist Dora Garcia, accompanied by performers Simon Asencio and Michelangelo Miccolis. The event on Thursday 19 January will feature a screening of the docu-fictional film Army of Love by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann; a discussion about the Army of Love and recruitment for their forthcoming week-long program at Casco in July 2017; movement and body-contact exercises; and a collective meal.
As the Army of Love exclaim, “romantic love is saturated with commoditization. The socialistic premise behind “free love” crumbles when desiring competition gets in the way, and in the age of hook-up apps, the possibility of free sex represents the liberalization, not the liberation, of love.” They point out a missing link in Marxist analysis: even in a society where there is access to basic needs, commodities, and structures, attractiveness is not distributed equally, “leaving out those considered to be old, ugly or unsuccessful.” The practitioners of the Army offer all-encompassing love – one that includes care, desire, sex, and respect absent of maudlin emotions yet full of gratitude – to all those who need it. The Army of Love is a real army in many senses: the emphasis it places in comradeship; its sense of duty and self-abnegation; the pleasure it draws from feeling one in all, all in one; its selflessness, altruism, generosity, and gallantry. Its soldiers are trained to practice love towards those they haven’t yet felt attraction for, and are ready to receive love from those that want to give it.
Since 2016, Niermann and Garcia have initiated recruitment by way of discussions, workshops, and training with the accompaniment of individuals such as Simon Asencio, Christian Bayerlein, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Krööt Juurak, and Michelangelo Miccolis. Various organizations have provided support and public platforms for the supergroup’s activities including Städelschule, Berlin Biennale, Wiesbaden Biennale, and now MACBA: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Casco. Through their various engagements with Casco in 2017, the Army of Love will deepen their focus on love and justice with new and current practitioners. Concurrently, Garcia will also run a class titled “Inadequacy” in the Independent Study Program (PEI) at MACBA, whose participants may later join the Army’s week-long workshop in July at Casco.
The Army of Love is now in a full process of formation and development. Its motives, strategies, modus operandi, and day-to-day routines are debated and discussed daily by its soldiers. The event at Casco will therefore be one of discussion and practice, of ideas and the exercise of those ideas. Would you consider joining the Army?
Learn more at the Army of Love website.
The Army of Love film by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann is available to watch online at UBUWEB.
