The eye can see things the arm cannot reach at Chiesa di San Giuseppe / Polignano a Mare

The eye can see things the arm cannot reach 

Farah
Al Qasimi, The Army of Love, Meriem Bennani, Hannah Black, Kate
Cooper, Emma Balimaka & Adrien Cruellas & Florian Sumi,
Cécile B. Evans, Adham Faramawy, FCNN, Dorota Gaw
ęda
and Egle
 Kulbokaite,
Alex Goss, Julie Grosche, Ilana Harris-Babou, The Institute of Queer
Ecology, Derek G Larson, Hanne Lippard, Jen Liu, Katy McCarthy, Orla
McHardy, Shala Miller, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Shana Moulton, Sondra
Perry, Agnieszka Polska, Tabita Rezaire, SAGG Napoli, Stephen
Vitiello.

Curated by Julie Grosche and Like A Little Disaster

12 September /
12 December 2020

Chiesa
di San Giuseppe – Polignano a Mare

Photo by Like A Little Disaster



Sinners
will be forgiven. Corrupt will not […]. Open yourself to love. i

Originally,
this video project was designed for the 17th century San Giuseppe
Church in Polignano a Mare, but with the pandemic and related rules
on social distancing, things have changed. The project underwent a
splitting process (IRL/online) which transformed it into a two-faced
herma, in love with a face that cannot be touched.

The
exhibition is actually set up in the church but public access will
never be allowed. It is possible to visit it only trough the online
platform Sajetta – so the project exists simultaneously online and
in the church where no one can experience it, except through a leap
of faith.

Doubting
is lawful. The doubt is in the game of faith,

in
the game of love.

But
nobody is here to check.

The
works involved revolve around love (not as a subject but as an
experience), conception, romance and intimacy, as well as female gaze
and body. The church becomes the blasphemous frame for the projection
of works that stage representations of love and sensuality.

Here,
the object of faith and belief become simply love.

The
eye can see things the arm cannot reach” is an ultra-private, maybe
purely speculative, project that leads us into the intimate dimension
of faith. Faith in something that is definitely happening, but that
no one can experience, assist or prove it, because to demonstration
it is to deny it. Faith that bodies and love are not just an
illusion; even during a pandemic.

Love
is the son of Penia; poverty, need, missing, absence.

All
the works involved show and invoke love for Other
(lovers/friends/children/sisters/communities/comrades) but visualized
in a way and in a time in which every interaction is denied. The show
is set inside a vessel that generally hosts people who believe that
the body of Christ really existed, but which now welcomes us, in the
vortex of a historical moment that allows us only to believe that the
others, their corporeity and their physical presence still really
exist.

Interactions
are now fantasized and the desire is at its apogee.

The
dreamed, awaited, escaped body becomes the image of a reproduction
responding to the dictation of desire. The lost body is truly absent;
loneliness becomes the space of its abstract presence. Abstraction
itself then is nothing but absence and pain, pain of absence – so
perhaps love.

The
condition of waiting for love-r can be defined as a mystical vocation
to imagination and reverie. The lover who waits does not know more
effective tools than the imagination to heal, albeit deceptively, the
absence of the loved one. While waiting, the lover “manipulates”
the object of love, giving it a body, a face, a character, intentions
and words, which never match reality. The entity awaited, the mass
centre of love dynamics, can actually prove to be nothing more than
an imagined object: who, then, is this body for me, if not the fruit
of my imagination? Isn’t it an unreal, evanescent body that I’m
actually waiting for? Is the awaited body endowed with its own
objectivity? Is its image linked, by its very nature, to the
subjectivity of those who think it?

Corpus
Domini. ii

An
important aspect emerging from the processes set in motion by the
alternation of the works can be found in the
idea/image/representation of the body and its ownership.

Quarantine
represented an intensely self-reflexive moment, a non-time in which
the body did not have to exhibit itself. Consequently, it also
represents the dimension of distancing, of detachment, not only from
others but above all from social constructs.

Love
is the exclusive space of intimacy, separated from society and the
roles it imposes; it becomes an absolute (solutus ab ? absolútus),
dissolved from everything, in which everyone can liberate the self
that cannot be express in the roles occupied in the social sphere.

Canonical
hours iii – of love.

The
videos will appear as visions in random and unpredictable moments of
the day (H24 – 7/7). This modality makes a full experience of the
contents impossible, in the same way that they cannot be experienced
in the church. In this way, the project, to be understood as an
autonomous work of art, claims its elusive nature, just like love’s.

Faith,
love, religion, all objects that we cannot fully understand, will be
treated for what they are; fading, impalpabilities, evanescences,
within the online display.

Between
one projection and the other a soundtrack, composed for the occasion
by Stephen Vitiello (with texts from Diderot, recited by Tracy
Leipold and Julie Grosche), will accompany and guide the visitor in
that dimension in which waiting is the time of missing itself. The
soundtrack is a fundamental element of the entire project, as well as
of the church; it is that which contains and connects the various
videos. The soundtrack becomes the space, the space of the absent
presence.

But
the other is absent; I invoke the other inwardly to keep me on the
brink of this mundane complacency, a temptation. I appeal to the
other’s ” truth” (the truth of which the other gives me the
sensation) against the hysteria of seduction into which I feel myself
slipping. I make the other’s absence responsible for my
worldliness: I invoke the other’s protection, the other’s return:
let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking
for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this social
infatuation, let the other restore to me ” the religious intimacy,
the gravity” of the lover’s world. iv

i
Pope Francis, from the mass for Italian parliamentarians (28 March
2014)

ii
The Feast of Corpur Domini or Corpus Christi (the “Day of the Most
Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ the Lord”), is a Roman
Catholic, Anglican, and Western Orthodox liturgical solemnity
celebrating the Real Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and
Divinity of Jesus Christ in the elements of the Eucharist.

iii
Canonical hours are an ancient subdivision of the day developed in
the Catholic Church for common prayer, also known as the “Divine
Office” or Opus Dei (“work of God”).

iv
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.