‘There is no better place to learn the art of loving than in community’, noted bell hooks in her book on love, All About Love: New Visions. What is love to us? How do we talk about it or define it? How do we map it in our lives? With the aim of collectively writing a love letter in response to our own visions, and in dialogue with poems, letters, songs and books on the subject of love, this workshop, which will be held in collaboration with a feminist writer and a feminist psychologist, will pursue a common reflection on care as both an intimate and political act.

On 21 October 2023, artist Anna Raimondo and writer Julie Ruocco hosted a workshop at Moussem Nomadic Arts Centre in Brussels, in the frame of MOUSSEM STAGES. The participants experimented with collective writing and polyphonic reading in an atmosphere of openness and trust. To facilitate discussion, they were encouraged to bring a short quote and/or selected passage to share their vision of love.

Anna Raimondo is a visual and sound artist living in Brussels. Interested in the practice of listening and its relationship to public space, she considers her work a medium of encounter and exchange. Her method, rooted in a feminist intersectional perspective, is flexible and changeable, accepting the accidental and the unforeseeable. Anna is a PhD student at ARBA and ULB.

Julie Ruocco is a writer with a degree in literature and political science. Passionate about digital cultures, she has published a work on aesthetic philosophy: Et si jouer était un art? Notre subjectivité esthétique à l’épreuve du jeu vidéo (L’Harmattan, 2016). Her first novel Furies (Actes Sud, 2021) was nominated for the Le Monde literary prize and received the Prix envoyé par la poste 2021, the Prix Emmanuel Roblès and the Prix Ulysse in 2022, among others.

Special thanks to Anna Smolak.

A love letter is written by : Clémentine, Leila, Sève Janssen, Surya, Silvia, Khadija, Barbara, Mariacarla, Carla, Teresa, Tinka Dzialas, Caroline, Julie Ruocco and Anna Raimondo.

Edited by Julie Ruocco and Anna Raimondo

Video
Footages: Serena Vittorini
Editing: Clorinda
Sound recording and editing: Anna Raimondo
Voices: Tinka Dzialas, Sève Jansenn, Anna Raimondo, Julie Ruocco
Music: Xylo-Ziko - Droplets