12.–21.4. / HAU1, HAU2, HAU3, HAU4
Forming the centrepiece of the “Love Is a Verb” festival is the “Vessel of Love”. In the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guins’ “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” – which focuses on narratives bundled in a container to counter historically male-dominated heroic stories – HAU1 is transforming into a vessel: various events such as concerts, performances, lectures, and talks will share, discuss, imagine, and celebrate pluralistic ideas about transformative relationships. The “Vessel of Love” is designed to be flexible and functional as to follow the respective artistic approaches. While the opening with A Song For You and Jumoke Adeyanju (12 April) and the concert by Ivo Dimchev (16 April) will feature a standing room for the audience, on other days the theatre will be transformed into an intimate, cocoon-like shelter. In developing the spatial concept, textile artist Diane Esnault and scenographer and lighting designer Shaly López were inspired by conversation pits – seating integrated into a recessed section of the floor that was championed as a special architectural feature in large living spaces, especially in the 1960s and 70s. In the centre of the room, seating islands covered with quilted textiles and lined with foam break through the frontality of the stage to bring discussions, readings, and lectures to a communal level of exchange. Gentle words of love are sewn into the textiles, while organic designs in pastel and calming tones express an ode to tenderness. Mountain-shaped, puffy seat backs are lined up around the seating islands: an archipelago in which each island welcomes you to share the space, engage in conversation, and linger together.
In choosing the colour palette, Esnault and López found inspiration in the works of textile artist Sophie Utikal, which have been staged in the “Vessel of Love”. The textile works are scenographic elements borrowed from the work “Full Melt Down” by choreographer Claire Lefèvre. Using images that you can touch, stroke, or hide behind, Sophie Utikal's works create both a physical and a metaphorical space. The result is a textile environment full of intimacy and softness – in which gentleness becomes a method, a theme, and a portal.
Sophie Utikal's works can also be found on the exterior façade of HAU1 and HAU2. These are prints of textile works from the series “There Is No Separation” in the form of flags and a large banner, each displaying women, whether in groups, in pairs, or individually.
“Even if one of the women lives alone on a piece of cloth, they all belong together. Whether I mean different people or myself in the diversity and contradictions of my own self is not really that important. It's about the encounter with one other, with yourself, and your surroundings.” (Sophie Utikal)
In her works, Sophie Utikal always deals with the agency of women of colour, with bodies, experiences of migration, multiple identities, and the contradictions thereof. The artist creates dream-like scenes and landscapes on textiles that address collective empowerment rituals, practices of care, and imagined future transformations of life on Earth.
In addition to these artistic positions, selected days in the foyers of the Vessel of Love will also feature allapopp's performative augmented reality project “Hyperlove”, a pop-up store by Other Nature, a book table by Die Buchkönigin and Ordadek, and the embroidery station by Tatreez Berlin.
