Where is the Love, Maybe we Should Take it to the Street*

We air a reading session that took place last summer, hosted by Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit and Moabit Mountain College at Strandbad Tegelsee/Zentrum für Kultur und Erholung. As a part of the reading series inviting diverse groups and collectives to share their practices, curator Agnieszka Kilian invited Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Hubert Gromny, Kelly Krugman, Mokia Laisin, and Lia Milanesio of the SAVVY team. Together, they brought together a communality of sense-making through reflections on intimacy, softness, and the comradeship of love. Love was given words by evoking fragments from writings of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alexandra Kollontai, adrienne maree brown, and more – editing texts with gasps of awe, stings of lingering pain, and heartbeats committed to rhythms of justice:

“Too often systematic abuse is insisted to be an expression of love and allegiance. Too many have been told that their economy, society, and family need their pain to exist. Who is benefitting or harmed from such a proclaimed allegiance that serves the function of loving a selected few in governance or in power, or of one above another, all in the name of ‘love’? How can we attune to listening to the wounds of such a love, and hear within them the possibilities of refusal and restoration? We will read together while trusting in our capacities of joy, of generative love and eros, and of intimacy: as creative forces grounded in deep sensual wisdoms of the body’s knowledge. We will accompany each other in witnessing how our body’s cells quietly and slowly respond to the sounds of words given to, and invoking, the complexities of love.” 

*title uses phrases from: "Where is the Love" by Black Eyed Peas and "Found" Tems ft. Brent Fayiaz