SOL’s practices are largely based on the sharing of personal stories. We consider life experiences as valuable situated knowledge from which to learn about love practices. Both our public and internal events often develop through listening first, and then emotionally, theoretically and artistically responding to what has been shared.
Email us to keep updated: schooloflove@protonmail.be
DEEP HANGING OUT (DHO)
Very informal and intimate, but at the same time public, Deep Hanging Out (DHO) is a recurrent gathering based on a protocol of checking in with each person present. We usually focus on a question that addresses a critical inquiry about love. Out of these sharings a collective reflection on our lives would emerge and shape the event. Sometimes the event is lightly curated with artistic or theoretical interventions related to the question addressed. Sometimes we deliberately create an empty and empathetic space for the unexpected to emerge. There is always food brought by everyone and shared. The DHO meetings are open to everybody and take place in Brussels.
From 2024 the DHO format will change into a series of performative alternative celebrations. We will get together during common holidays celebrated in Belgium, in order to actualise them. We wish to make their content and form more relevant for the urgencies that we feel deserve to be celebrated today. The intimate nature of the DHO will be kept – it will be a moment of encounter, of sharing, of creating a sense of togetherness.
More about that – soon.
TOGETHER-MESS
Together-mess is an art laboratory that fosters meaningful encounters among artists and activists. Its motivated by the wish to contribute to mutual inspiration and a sense of community in the cultural field. Addressing urgent societal issues, the sessions aim to extend creative processes beyond artists’ individual practices. Part takers are invited to collectively develop or strengthen practices of love, solidarity and kinship.
Together-mess includes practice and theory sharing and collective brainstorming. It aims at developing collaborative creation processes that act upon the concerns the session addresses, which might be the springboard for future projects and collaborations.
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The next Together-mess sessions (April 2024) will revolve around an extended notion and practice of family life, where kinship, friendships and communality replace the model of the romantic couple and the nuclear family. Such models exist around and within us and we see in them a crucial way of survival, but they are often precarious and legally unprotected. The participants of Together-mess will engage with creating prototypes of support structures for those of us who live and love within these (still) alternative constellations. The poetic and the practical, the imagined and the hands on, the playful and the structured will hopefully reinforce each other in the creation of tools for a wished-for new kin paradigm.
If you wish to take part in the coming session – let’s talk.
LOVERYNTH
Designed as a participatory and performative project for secondary school pupils and teachers, Loverynth inquires in artistic ways on the nature of socially engaged love. Using the metaphor of love as a labyrinth, we explore various paths, in which the romantic is only one among other more social and political roads paved within the love maze.
Methodologically, we use artistic conversation tools to examine the relationships between practices of love, school and art. We ask whether the school is a place of kinship and research how love could be a part of its curriculum, and If school itself, as a system, is capable of loving. In that way, we create an intimate space where personal stories are shared and become the knowledge and material we work with. Consequently, the project itself becomes a space that fosters love and kinship. The exchange grows into collective creative processes that reflect on different notions of love or that enact love, in which art is regarded as a tool to study, or even transform socio-cultural realities.
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The current Loverynth sessions will revolve around a comparison between a historical text about love, the Symposium by Plato, and what love could mean to us today.