Practicing Intimacy,
a Personal Note

Chiarina Chen

Waking up in Vienna, jetlag. Flew from China, before that I was in Netherlands, before Netherlands I was in New York. To locate myself was not easy even it seems obvious. Let’s try. 

Where: Vienna.

Why: ?

I started to think about this project, theme: “Intimacy in the Era of Global Connection”, I naturally reflected my own ‘errantries’ in the past two years, projects, mobilizations, relationships, etc. At some point it’s like series of plug in and plug out processes with continuum of cities, encounters, neurons, screens. Exhaustion, Woke up right here.

Answer: I am doing this project because of a genuine exhaustion.

By genuine exhaustion I mean not to see it as ‘negative’ or with hard feelings, but simply to pulse, instead of denial or escape, to acknowledge it, and to view it as an affirmative threshold.

The word intimacy triggers such genuine exhaustion and makes me wonder, how do we deal with it.

To me first of all intimacy has to do with relations that held by concrete subjects. Concluding a series of static analysis or definitions backed by scientific methods is dull, simply because it does not make sense anymore to hold on to abstract or seismic plays where there are concrete subjects to deal with. Well, the subject matters and the matter matters.

We live in an interesting time, a time when technology is intimately weaved into daily lives, organic/inorganic is fuzzed… We perceive human, nonhuman forces, yet felt fatigue in connecting with every/anything, even with ourselves. In such metadata society, when someone searches for intimate moments, he/she might often found things absurd and contradictory.

Actually, these are two interesting recurring motifs that happen in our lives almost all the time. No matter how much knowledge you gain, whichever system you recite, how many places and people you encounter, you know it by heart that life is full of absurdity and contradictories. We might strive to encourage connections while not making any efforts to the people we live with. You want to open to someone but found it so hard to be vulnerable. I am writing about relation while I’m anxious about dealing with it. I am sure my past life is a mushroom while I can never stop eating it. (who does that?)

What I meant to say is, as humans we are absurd and contradictory, sometimes. It is ok. And it’s part of becoming intimate relations. By becoming intimate, I mean knowing ‘intimacy’ is never an one dimension ‘thing’ one can grasp, but constant movements of connections and disconnections.

It sounds exhausted again. Exactly, for exhaustion is such an important threshold to turn those contradictory, unease, and absurd moments into attempts on forming relations and becoming intimate.

How to deal with ‘intimate crisis’ ?

Practice.

Practice with absurdity, contradictories, with imagination and wonder.

This summer I encountered Rosi Braidotti and had a chat right after the Posthuman Conference at Utrecht University. We talked about de-psychologizing approach to address anxiety, exhaustion and affirmative ethics. I freshly remembered her energy, “ as post-cold war generation, those days we hang out together all the time. We are always in groups, grabbing beers.” she looked at me, “your generation is very different.”

What touched me, among these simple talks, was a subtle moment when an intimate space was created, as we wonder each other’s cartography.

Practicing Intimacy  

Six of us have six weeks to mount an exhibition from scratch. 

To me it is a process and an experiment.

It is a practice on intimacy.

We gathered from around world, holding the theme “intimacy” in our hands, conducting series of encountering from the point when we are strangers to each other, to the city, to artists. We ask ‘what intimacy is’ as we literally walking around the city, getting to know each other, settling new temporal spaces to live, delving into artist’ practices.

From autumn to very late autumn, Vienna becomes a backdrop and together we carve out an open space that allows personal voices as well as collective stories interlink.

Intuitively I think to ‘practice’ intimacy, you need space and duration. Space, interweaved by virtual, physical, even mythological, where one opens and allows another force to act upon and to connect. Duration, as simple as the cliché goes ‘things don’t happen overnight’. The spinning speed of metadata society and over surplus information won’t hold any one-time impressions longer than a 24 hour Instagram story. Duration allows spaces to be expansive in time, and grounds one to connect, to build memory, and to endure.

Here human, or nonhuman, encounter by the state of imagining. One can be intimate with someone who encounters IRL yet spends most of the time virtually. He/she can also be intimate with its personal history, found him/herself in a space where links the ancestor. Let it be online, offline, virtual or real, to architect the space and duration is a human act and a choice.

It is not to enclose ‘intimacy’ with overarching definitions, but to situate it with concrete subjectivities.

Taking “is this intimacy?” with you as standing in front of Alfredo’s Kibu, or Aanna-Clara’s monologues, reaching to where he/she weaves intimate relation, space therefore is created whenever a person starts to wonder, to imagine, to reach to another being instead of asserting his own.  

Intimacy here is therefore not generated from feelings of sameness, familiarities, or transparencies. On the contrary, it is grounded upon differences and wonders, upon the fact that we acknowledge it is impossible to reduce another person, yet we are still able to open (not enclosed ourselves),to listen, to reach the unreachable.

In the exhibition, you won’t see asserting categories or meanings of intimacy, but assemblage of attempts, concerns, experiments, and wonders. It’s not your own system/definition that brings you closer to another person, but the willing to approach another.

With opacity and imagination.