Army of Love / Version 4

“It has to do with surrender in a greater sense, in a religious sense. The out- come of love is open”. (Matthias Vernaldi in the lm Army of Love)

When we face the challenge of considering love as a collective practice, a social or even as a political category—beyond romantic pair bonds—we quickly arrive at a point where our imagination is stamped with the impression that love is solely to 
be found and also sought in a private, individual realm. Many more than we would imagine fall by the wayside in the attempt to find the ‘right’ partner, security and loving affection. It is the insecure and inhibited ones, the older people or those with psychological or physical handicaps who cannot or can no longer win through in the competition of desirability. Love, in all its facets, is a fundamental need as essential as nourishment or sleep, and it is necessary to establish it as a fundamental right. This is the agenda the Army of Love has written on its flag.

The film of the same name by Ingo Niermann and Alexa Karolinski was made for the Berlin Biennale 2016. It develops its intensity in the mutual affection und physical contact of the participants, filmed in a swimming pool with the water as an additional element appearing to blur the physical boundaries. They relate in voice-over their strengths but also their shortcomings, their needs, experiences and yearnings as well as their hopes 
to the Army of Love. This film represents in itself a surrendering abandon towards love, awakening in the viewer a desire not just to be a excluded observer but instead to plunge into this slow round dance of giving and taking, of mutual trust, dropping and letting go. It brings people from various worlds of experience together, and nothing appears to separate them as what binds them is the unfettered wish to overcome separation.

In preparation for this contribution, I took part in a workshop of the Army of Love 
in October 2017 in Utrecht out of curiosity and because the idea of establishing the subject of love into public discourse on potentialities of social change fascinates me. The workshop had an extremely full program. It included workshops on the Wheel
 of Consent, a communications concept by Betty Martin, which aims at aiding the practice of mutually consented touching, improvisations of touching with The Touching Community (with Aimar Pérez Galí and Jaime Cons-Salazar Pérez). There were presentations by organizations such as FleksZorg, an association that promotes the availability of sexual care for people with physical and psychological handicaps and to get this welfare service established in the state benefits system, and by the Decolonizing Beauty Collective of the University of Colour, a queer feminist PoC group that is fighting to break the post-colonial view of the body and beauty, and also a film presentation of Community Action Center by A. K. Bruns and A. L. Steiner, a film that examines the boundaries and accepted paradigms of feminism, collectivism, pornography and sexual identity, and that is mentioning just a few…

The fullness of the program meant there was little time to reflect upon what the Army of Love actually is or what actions it could precisely take. The approaches to this issue were as numerous as the intentions of the individual participants. Which aspects of love is it really about? Is it about a just distribution of sex and tenderness? Is it about championing mutual affection, understanding and care on a social level? Or is it more about an all-embracing spiritual love? Questions about power difference and dependencies were raised, the competences of even being able to give and take, but also the necessity of a safe space, where it is actually possible to let oneself go, especially for those who see themselves as exposed to reprisals on account of their sexual orientation.

As a movement, the Army of Love is a fluid group of people surrounding its initiator, Ingo Niermann and further Dora García and many others, who have various and, in part, activist roots and experience horizons, and who have committed themselves to revolutionizing the phenomenon of love in the sense of social justice, sometimes with very personal consequences: in any event, whatever relates to a respectful interaction with each other, tolerance, the wish for justice and openness towards others but also the longing to feel part of something larger. But what about those who do not possess such basic skills? There are far too many for whom love appears to be a dangerous terrain. Experiences of violence and exclusion can result in walls where everything is defensively reacted against with precisely that violence and exclusion, often even an offer of affection. How close and impenetrable these walls are built well depends upon individual experiences and the potential to open oneself up at least in stages. These people should also not be left behind. In the face of the increasing breakdown of solidarity with the weakest in our societies on a social and political level, open agitation against Muslims and a coarsening of language, these issues have perhaps become more important than ever.

And can one really love everyone? That reflex-like defensive and exclusion mechanisms can be penetrated is impressively demonstrated in workshops such as the Touching Community. In mutual physical touching, giving myself over to receiving as well, mostly with closed eyes, I get to know the essence of the other and bypass reservations and judgements in an almost playful way. In the end it is completely insignificant whose hand I am stroking there, who the elbow I am touching belongs to, or who is softly tracing my face. The boundaries between me, you and all of you can blur. Affection comes into being through the process of unreservedly giving oneself up to the others. Just as I can strengthen the muscle of my heart through regular training, I can also train its ability to surrender itself and fathom the limits of my supposedly threatened integrity. Right up to an almost painful openness and penetrability for emotions which include all and everything and make it possible for me to experience myself as part of a single organism. Perhaps a spiritual dimension, beyond all religions, only palpable with the immediacy of the body.

We live in a culture of competitiveness and elimination. Our entire way of thinking
is characterized by the need to climb the ‘normative’ ladder of success in all aspects of life as confidently as possible in order to lead a happy life. However, perhaps we might finally dare bid goodbye to the concept of the survival of the fittest and ‘(re?) turn’ to a culture that puts the unifying before the divisive and does not see the success and happiness of an individual as detached from the success and happiness of all. Love—in all its aspects—has a strongly transformative potential that can help other ideas of social relationships to develop far further than a merely respectful interaction. For when I sense myself to be an inseparable part of a complete organism, I cannot be indifferent to the development of malign metastases anywhere. This is a collective challenge—a societal modification of the self that cannot be achieved masterfully by one alone. It is not ‘just’ about making sure those excluded from love are not left behind but rethinking the category love in a social context, to anchor it there and bring it to a place of political action.

The Army of Love is an expanding experiment that approaches the issue from numerous formats—films, exhibitions, talks, discussions and body awareness workshops. It is a kind of think tank and training camp for all those who intermittently or also continually get together in order to carry the torch of their experiences and ideas in the interests of society, where love plays the central role, into their communities and further out into the world.

Excerpt of round table: Day 2 Army of Love Recruitment Camp, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht 12.10.2017

A: The intention is that we’re creating this training camp of the Army of Love to investigate what it could be with committed participants and then there will be an exhibition* in November.

B: It’s a very protected environment here, which is good for us to feel comfortable with one another. But we discussed various kinds of possibilities—I mean it’s something that I can do individually—but call out to the streets like where we’re first considering a performative scenario for this. We were talking about the possibility to approach passersby, like, really hit the streets and see what could result. Yesterday I went to a coffee shop, smoked a joint, and ended up talking about the Army of Love to five people. They were very curious, asking me a lot of questions. I do think that maybe after four days there will hopefully be enough energy amongst all of us to attempt to spread the message. I see a group of people here who are curious and available, and it’s very different to have this message come across when you find a lot of cynicism and resistance and skepticism, you know?

C: Since we began we have been talking to so many different people; many of you have come because you have heard…

B: Yeah, I was very impressed…

C: …but when people talk to me about it, they always ask, “What do you do exactly?” and “How can I join the Army of Love?” And I always answer, “You know we are debating what it is exactly, so you can join the debate. But this is not really a place where you can go and practice.” I’m even tempted to say, “The Army of Love is already you. It is in your hands to…”

B: I think what throws off people is the idea of the terms we sometimes use, like ‘recruitment camp.’ It seems that people come here and latch onto a specific phrase at training. So maybe it’s also a question of the terms we’re using.

D: We could do something on Saturday, like an open house? We could approach people, whenever we think that’s the situation, and invite them. So they’re welcome to come by and then we think of something that we could offer.

B: It could also be interesting if a small group really hit the streets with me and we could try and see what happens. I am here also in a facilitator kind of role somehow, and because I have a background as a performer there is a fine line to play with. You know, that’s why I think ‘recruitment camp’ is still a term that we can still use because it fictionalizes the thing somehow and I like that.

D: How will you answer if they ask you what is happening?

B: To join the debate. That is basically what I told these people yesterday. I mean, I told them we are presenting the project and it’s an open discussion. We’re bringing these things forth. We’re not expecting to change the world, we’re just attempting to trigger something. That’s why, I mean, I’m here because I feel that an attempt is better than anything.

A: But I also feel that we’re all here just thinking about our time together. And since everyone brings their own experiences and interests and desires to the table there could be a portion of the day that’s like free play. There is really the chance to build something with this specific group and then maybe we have something more to say than “It’s only a debate.” It should be debatable or potentially debatable.

C: Participants from former workshops and I were wondering if it would be a year to try to debate crucial subjects that have been coming up again and again that have never been solved, and probably would never be solved, but it might be interesting to locate them in order to find a sort of method… to have a focus, one point for instance, just quickly one point because of how we begin the debate. I think someone was pointing out that s/he came because s/he was interested in love as a political tool. So the notion of Alexandra Kollontai that is present in many movements now is interesting: the idea of revolutionary love, Love Trumps Hate and these kinds of things, love as a kind of political weapon. And this is also something that Ingo often does when we are again accused of calling this an ‘army,’ which is something that 
is perhaps funny in the context of love. I think this is something he often answers, “Love is dangerous—love is a weapon.“ And this is a subject that has to do with mutual support, autonomous groups. Illness-as-a-weapon is a classical slowdown of the anti-psychiatry movement. It pushes you into the stigma corner, as something to be proud of, as something to use against the world. I think it’s really worth debating.

D: It would be nice to keep them in light and talk about them everyday and some will see as well, when we have the evening events, if we can relate it to these topics. What does love comradeship mean? For me, that’s exactly the question. Where, actually, is the love coming in? Is it just rhetoric or is it actual love? That’s the really interesting question. I’ve thought a lot about it and I ask myself if the Army of Love needs something like a codex, in the sense of guidelines…

B: Another hotspot we always get kind of provoked with is the question of how we deal with the actual sexual act or sensual love, the separation of sensual love and fraternal love. I think it goes back to this comradeship.

C: At the end, you decide what love is or what a sexual act is. Sexuality does not necessarily have to involve ejaculation, certainly. You could say that the hand touching yesterday and the knee touching during the workshop were also sexual acts. So this is one thing that relates to an important hotspot, another is the notion of prostitution. What is the role that money plays in it? And, of course, money is not only literal cash, but also status, prestige: symbolic money. This was something very much discussed
 in Barcelona when we had a sexual assistance discussion with other communities, 
like the White Hands Community. There are many services that are advertised as free because otherwise they would get into legal troubles, but in the end it is not free. People who use it pay.

E: I just wanted to add something. Very often when we talk about money it tends to sound like if you give services for free that you’re a better person than if you charge money. The problem is that that assumes a privilege because if you have all this time to do all these things for free it means you have money from somewhere else to cover your life expenses. So that is just one factor in what we’re talking about: the inequality that can be created if the gift goes in one direction and there is no sort of payment.

F: With the ‘gift,’ all different concepts of social indebtedness come up. But there is another related question, about dependency actually. I don’t know how much we want to go on this…and why we think of dependency negatively. And I would also say, in regard to the codex, we have to question when something starts to be normalized or pathologized, particularly desire and how it’s policed. I think those are pretty important questions.

C: I just want to point out the idea of Kingsley Hall in the 70s, in which psychiatrists lived with their patients and created a kind of commune to break the power between psychiatrists and patients. This power was reproduced and the people who were there say it was much more complicated because there was no money involved. So when the person in treatment pays the therapist it is very clear what their relation is. It’s the same, for instance, if an artist pays an assistant, which is good of course. But if the assistant does it for free then questions arise of authorship or exploitation, all these kinds of things. Even when the assistant is supposed to have access to the art world, which is so vague that in the end you could say, “Well, you know I’m having sex with an artist and it is not paid in any way.” So, money has a function in these kinds of relations that are not equal.

D: When you read, for example, David Graeber and his ideas of anarchist commons, he mentions that it’s just exchange without money. There is the idea that money is something evil, but at the same time there is the idea of mutual exchange that we discussed. And of course, the concept of the Army of Love at least challenges this idea. I know, from my disabled friends, yes of course paying someone can also be an empowering situation and the idea that someone is giving me something for free can also be regarded as something paternalistic.

G: It is so important to take a look at the qualities of people because desires that we’re having in society, through advertisement, have only one specific image. So I was wondering if you just implement different kinds of desire, could you also maybe desire the disabled? We have to see everybody’s personal talents and qualities, and not whether there is something wrong with someone…

H: It’s about uncovering not-so-visible qualities, to look at something totally different, to see it as another thing…

G: I have been living in these communities and it could happen that we didn’t really become friends, though we were living together. So what happens is that everybody gets their role in the house, everybody has their space and which quality they have in keeping the house running well. This can be practical also in the sense of what the other can give. So I could give, maybe, my ear for listening to your story but the other could give me a massage on my bed, you know? It’s a more an organic way of creating community…

F: But those roles are not given to someone because of their objective status, they are given to them because of various traits that they have, their personality. So it’s not just that a disabled person is better in listening so they have to listen, right?

E: I really value the honesty, but there’s this assumption that loving a disabled person is hard and I want the people that believe so to tell me why.

H: I didn’t even think about disabled persons. Ugliness is totally subjective. You find someone ugly for whatever your matrix of desire is not fitting, then you really try to see how is this person, like…

E: … But you’re talking about people you don’t know. I don’t even have sex with people I don’t know. From the moment I interact I am getting more input… there is something from the beginning of the Army of Love… it is not to attack you, but there is something I want to learn: I understand that someone I don’t know—or I find disgusting because this person was just vomiting for three hours, whatever—I don’t find attractive, but that’s just an image of something. But once you approach a person, ask the person… When does one characteristic becomes such a surmountable huge problem that you have to create a whole army to solve it?

B: We live in the 21st century and we’ve been brainwashed and bombarded since we were born, so we have—even on default, unwillingly, I don’t know—created structures and models of desire. You seem to be fantastically open and able to feel it differently, but it feels to me that everyone…

C: I started to think, “Who would I find very disgusting to have sex with?” and I think of politicians, you know? And I don’t know them. I never really saw them, but I would say I really have a terrible problem giving love to these people.

E: And do you want to be in the Army to overcome that? To be able to have sex with Rajoy, I don’t think so… [laughs] We’re not here to be able to have sex with people we don’t want to change, to include them because… I may have other obstacles, so with very chauvinistic guys… I don’t even want to overcome that.

C: In this context, the notion of stigma becomes interesting. The book Stigma by Erving Goffman begins with a letter from a woman that has no nose and explains that actually she has a very nice shape and is very intelligent, but she cannot have any real love relation because she has no nose. And so this is how the book of stigma begins.

B: In the gay scene there is this thing of body shaming, so if you’re not fit you’re not in the gay community. It’s very fascist, but it happens—it’s very, very present. So, it’s not the disabled… I mean you’re just… they are not reaped like fucking super models.

I: It connects to the question of what is desire and what is love and I think desire very often is connected to not only what we desire in someone else but also what we desire ourselves to be. So I might fall in love with someone because this person reflects something of what I want to be like back to me. I mean, this is not a definition of love, I just think it’s an aspect that’s very present in the way love works in our society, no? And I think in that regard when we talk about ability as well as about social status and beauty, these things play a big role. And when it comes maybe to loving someone for a longer time this person represents my possibilities of where I can go or where I can’t go. You were asking why is it an underlying assumption that it’s hard to love someone who is disabled. It is because this person has a lot more barriers in their life to come across. And when you are together with this person you are meeting that too. It is a very egoistic point of view but I think that’s related. I don’t think it makes any sense to not talk about these things because I think that’s connected to desire. How do we actually desire and why do we desire a certain person? My question would be how could we come to broaden our desires as well, because it requires some inner reflection and inner honesty. And so I was asking myself, “What does it mean to be a soldier in the Army of Love?”

K: But also I feel that desire is not something that is just natural. I don’t believe in the biological rules of attraction that you are just for some reason attracted to some people, and not to others, and it is some kind of natural thing. I think that desire is formed by our society and it’s pretty obvious. Media and capitalist structures form specific ideals of what a person should look like and they also wouldn’t limit it to disability, also just facial structures like a symmetrical face, or a specific type of healthiness, or body size, or being not white, or people of color, all these kinds of factors… I decide to desire differently. It is not a decision you make once and it requires work and trying to find out how to accomplish it. Because from childhood you have all these movies that have specific images of how a couple should look. It’s always a very thin, maybe longhaired woman, and a tall muscular guy, and you cannot just say, “I’m not into that. I’m deciding right now that I desire everyone and I don’t care and I think it’s not a choice.”

D: The topic of disability is so much in focus because that is actually a handicap in terms of love and what we, or the Army of Love, present is about that. It’s really about being differently abled and that does not mean that every disabled person is differently abled in terms of love, but some are and the film portrays them. That’s the reason why they are in this film. I mean, it would be an interesting exercise, “Who is, for each of us, the most disgusting, repelling person you could think of getting intimate with?” I think we should really, at some point, do this exercise.

A: I’m not a… my interest in the Army of Love is not to figure out how I can have sex with…

D: … I mean just being physically close. I found really interesting that you first mention ‘Love Trumps Hate’ as a great example, which is actually about even embracing hate. In the next example, you said the most disgusting people you could think of are certain politicians. That’s a very concrete scenario where definitely there is a need.
 We wouldn’t even know of these people… they’re living in this ghetto of a clinic. You would even have to think of how you could actually approach them. We have, for instance, societies that help people dying, so there is an infrastructure for this. If you are about to die someone will take care of you and will hold your hand, but if you’re just having dementia and you’re old and not about to die, then you are fucking alone. This definitely exists in our society, so this would be, for me, a very concrete scenario… and if you think of what an Army of Love would do about it, then we could have a kind of complete scenario… like how would we approach it. How will we get in there? What would we offer? What is the signal of consent when people have severe dementia? Then would come all these questions of equality, of codex and so on. There are a lot of crucial questions I think we would have to ask ourselves.

L: There are so many people my age already that live alone, or have so much violence in their families, children are alone with this… then we would have to start already
 in the families because this is the beginning. When I start my life and I don’t learn to love, if I only learn to defend violence, or survive war, if you take a look at all these refugees, what will happen with them? They have their traumas that will live on further in their families. I have to say “the disabled” or “people with dementia” and all these certain groups… but we are all a part of this. And first of all we have to learn to love, to heal ourselves and really become open to others… What I want to say is that I have problems with this kind of projection on specific groups.

B: How can we think about how we’re all implicated, but there are very particular people that are structurally bared… there are such larger systems at play, like white supremacy and how our desire is shaped, heteronormativity and all of these things, all these like influences of capitalist, colonialist… How do we balance that?

K: Of course there are structural problems, but to say it’s a personal problem is kind of what capitalism does: it says, “You are lonely because you failed to find a partner, you are lonely because you are failing to achieve some kind of ideal of what you should be and how you should approach people.“

M: I think the conversation about this idea of desire as something that will fill the hole in you… there is this human ideal that is whole and perfect and so therefore in certain communities disability doesn’t exist as such because when you have what we would consider a disability it’s not considered as negative or something that is taken away from a whole, ‘perfect’ person. The social model of disability is… the world is structured in a very specific way for a very particular kind of body and nobody’s body is going to be able to move through the spaces we’ve created for it, perfectly, for their entire lives.

All images: stills from Army of Love Training Camp, HD video, camera and editing by Carlos Muñoz, sound by Christina Pitouli, as part of Army of Love training camp (Utrecht, October 11 – 14 2017), program at Muziekhuis Lombok, Parnassos Cultuurcentrum, and Zimihc Theater, Utrecht and organized by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons for the project-exhibition Army of Love with Dora García and Ingo Niermann. Courtesy the participants and Casco.

Presentations and exercises were led by Marije Janssen and Dennis Bontje; Aimar Pérez Galí and Jaime Conde-Salazar; Michelangelo Miccolis; Mirjana Smolic; Jules Sturm; FleksZorg; The Decolonize Beauty Collective of University of Colour, Lindsay Grace Weber, and Olave Basabose and Manon la Décadence. The discussions and activities were thus shaped by the participants of the camp, mostly comprised by those with arts and activist backgrounds, including Amaranta Heredia, Anja Khersonska, Ashiq Khondker, Augusto Cascales, Bogdan Obradovi, Caner Teker, Carolin Haentjes, Dora García, Elorri Harriet, Frédérique Vivet, Ingo Niermann, Karin Iturralde, Linda Klösel, Lori and Donna van Vlerken, Ninon Goutelle, Nora Cherñajovsky, Staci Bu Shea, Suzanne Kollen, Svenja Engels, Svenja Schennach, Tamara Kuselman, Taraneh Fazeli, and Virginia Zanetti.

*Army of Love exhibition at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht, 26 Nov 2017 – 25 Feb 2018