Love is not Art (2017, video-installation by Fransien van der Putt & Vera Sofia Mota)

'You wouldn't have known her, you'd have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its loads of tears.' (Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, 1986)

A woman in front of a Skype camera having an intimate conversation with an invisible other. An endless stream of words that overlap. You try to grasp meaning, story, sense but it only holds on for a little while. Love is not Art is an immersion into an individual speaking her mind and a confrontation with the contemporary conditioning of art and life. It raises questions about performance and representation in an age of digital communication. Who is on the other side? Are you there? The silence of the other is a challenge we have to face time and again…

This artwork is a glimpse into the intimate friendship of two women and artistic partners. Fransien van der Putt and Vera Sofia Mota have been collaborating for almost ten years. In 2013, during a residency in Den Haag, The Netherlands, they worked on how associative speech could be intensified without falling into an empty collection of words and phrases. They explored how sense could be created out of a random input of words, names or concepts.

Love is not Art is like the noise of the world, the sound of society and discourse performed in a specific channel, a digital medium. We want to understand words, be articulate with them, as they produce meaning, create sense. This might not always be true, we might be frustrated with it.

Is she lonely or merely alone? Aren’t we all are in the end? Isn’t that a very boring fact? Who are we talking to? Can we stand the silence of the other? Art needs lack, gaps, the reality of post-human measurements, rhythm and size. Love is not art.

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​* Love is not Art (Video Still), 2017, Video-installation, Variable dimensions, 10’14’’
Concept: Fransien van der Putt & Vera Sofia Mota
Starring: Fransien van der Putt 
Recording: Vera Sofia Mota, Den Haag (Skype), 2013
Editing: Helle Lyshøj

Thanks to: Ana Rita Manuel, Mario Hoetzel, Heinz Schwarzzenberger and Anna Chwialkowska.

*Photos: Ana Rita Manuel, Salvador Martínez. Video-installation at nun, Berlin, 2017.