This theme highlights practices of love where love is a method of thinking, working, relating and being. In 1994 writer Njabulo Ndebele declared that:
'Public intimacies do need private intimacies. This is the discovery of personal and social meaning through the pains and the joys of belonging, participating, trusting, and just feeling at home.’
Since then the struggle for balance and maintaining a holistic sense of self in atmospheres of ongoing, pervasive coloniality, have increasingly foregrounded the need for expressions of love and loving as necessary and active. This has been made manifest in creative practices from writing to performance.
Drawing from the extensive work of thinkers such as bell hooks and Audrey Lorde, the ICA considers in its archive, articulations of love as a set of moral principles that guide creative practice. Through this theme, love is firmly situated as a central locus rather than a peripheral sentimental emotion of adoration.
Radical love and all its demands - encompassing care, devotion, passion, longing, tenderness, and tough love emerge, rooted in responsibility and action. The lectures, performances and projects probe and consider love through the vitality of its different textures - often sensual, dangerous, erotic, and powerful.
A selection from the ICA archive follows, comprising:
Performance
iQhiya - The Commute II (2016)
Performance & Podcast
Athi-Patra Ruga - Things We Lost in the Rainbow (2018)
Public Lectures
Things Unfinished... (2018)
Performance
donna Kukama - We the Not-Not People! -Things done, not told. Inscribed, not written (2018)
Public Lectures
Medical Humanities Series (2016) | Lester Davids, Shose Kessi, Berni Searle - Skin Lightening and the Politics of Beauty
Performance & Essay
Gabrielle Goliath -Elegy (2017) and ‘State of Emergency: Inkulumo-Mpendulwano (Dialogue) of Emergent Art When Ukukhuluma (Talking is Not Enough)’ – an essay by Nondumiso Msimanga from the ICA Publication, Acts of Transgression (2019)
