Susurros De Amor (The Whispers of Love)

“Intimacy is a lush blanket woven from many threads...” (Taken from hyperallergic.com) by Zachary Small.
 Production notes: two nights, 4 hours each night. Artists Francis Fay and John Freeman. "Pornscape" mixed and edited by Edward Cunliff.
 Site:Gentleman's Toilets, The Workman's Club, Dublin, 2015
http://www.livecollision.com/portfolio/whispers-of-love/b


SUSURROS DE AMOR -“THE WHISPERS OF LOVE” (SPANISH), OVERHEARING OR GLIMPSING AN INTIMATE ACT. Today, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and dating sites like Grinder and Gaydar, facilitate a heightened degree and volume of engagement, with online personae often subsituting these erstwhile embodied realities. Frequently updating profiles, quantifying ‘Likes’ and changing photographs have however been reported to feed a narcissistic obsessiveness distancing users from that which they most yearn – intimacy, connectedness, transcendence – in a vain attempt for distraction from loneliness and alienation. The saturation of pornography throughout our society has likewise been attributed to the same impulse. Sexualisation and violence serve as the soundtrack of contemporary culture, noise interfering with the moment, with being present, with being intimate. But what if instead of having our heads buried in a mobile phone or glued to a screen, we were to find ourselves in an environment in which real bodies exist and virtual identities are absented? This durational performance, an intermittent soundscape culled from found Internet porn videos plays in the near dark, could just as easily be bells, car horns or the noise of a crowd at a football match. A spotlight shines from above on two men, standing naked, face-to-face and perfectly still. GUEST ARTIST John Freeman (MFA, Burren College of Art), my first collaborative durational performance partner, is a sensitive visual artist with a lack of ego and generosity that appeal. “[His] process externalizes the internal, examining the relationship between the different components of the human subconscious both separately and in flux. In turn, his work becomes an experimentation with accessing and physically externalizing the secret and unimagined, an attempt to come to personal.
Francis Fay