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The Sex Asylum

residentie 5/5 > 31/5/2021  extra muros

DIY PERFORMANCES @ YOUR HOUSE - Looking for Volunteers!
15 May opening, 31 May online discussion performance

The Sex Asylum is a longterm research project, initiated by the artistic-spiritual-activist cel The Monastery. This research turns around the notions of sexuality as an activist force for a counterculture of intimacy, radical honesty and an ethics of ecological community awareness. The research opens up the understanding of the sexual to a performance of mutual individuation and transformation, and in that sense an embodied critique on identity politics, in a post-gendered world. 

The Asylum is a place where sex is freed from its constraints of projection, repetition, direction and commodification. To return to a place of intimate trepidation, true nakedness, fear, elation and trembling. A place where sex can be free to express itself in all relations, be it between people, art works, objects, ideas and others. To make love to the world is an encounter that overrides the normativity of identity and recognition. A free fall into potential and creativity without normative framework. It is a place where sex is freed from its current identity, but also where we are freed from the expectations of sex and penetration. And the endless repetition of the same. 

An Asylum is also a place where we can rekindle the Crazy, the disturbing, the unexpected and the irregular in our modes of behaving and relating. 

And although for me this research could eventually lead to the realisation of a Sex (Asylum) Club in which people could experience intimacy and its trepidation in a set of highly sensuous but non-directive object installations.

DIY PERFORMANCES:

In May 2021 The Monastery brings the Sex Asylum to your house in the form of ‘desiring machines’: object installations that we install in your home, that kindle your desire, and the intimate connection to your own body, your space and the objects in it, and the other inhabitants of the house. For this we are looking for volunteers, to do a preliminary interview session, and inspire the development of the ‘machine’. After this preliminary working period the ‘desiring machine’ will then be installed in your home for a one month period. 

After this period the machines will be returned to the Monastery and recycled into machines for the public Club. At the last day we will organise an online event talking with a public and the users of the machines about the artivist power of desire. Throughout the process we might ask you to document your experiences, and we will provide you with the tools to sustain and deepen your process. 

To become a volunteer user, please send a mail to themonasterybrussels@gmail.com

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