Bad at love

performance with Luke Deane

On Thursday 14th of March 2024 at 7:30pm I performed Bad at Love with Luke Deane as co-performer (composing music on the spot, manipulating my field recordings and singing with me), and Amy Gowen (HumDrumPress) as “wrangler” and future editor/publisher of the written component of the project.

The project is a very intimate exploration of my personal struggles with love and relationships, but it also aims to address societal questions about the commodification of love and whether reckoning with existential threats and material (and immaterial) infrastructures can reshape our understanding of it.

The performance lasted two and a half hours including a break and was completely improvised: we conceived it as an “open book/open album,” an opening up of the artistic process since its early stages, welcoming people’s input and questions. Instead of presenting the poetic texts that I wrote over a period of two years in a predefined order, I projected on a screen the Scrivener project that contains about eighty poems and I let the audience decide which one we should use as the material for our next improvisation, based on the titles and what they could see as I was scrolling through it. During the second half of the show we invited the audience to make sounds with us. I guided people through a grounding exercise at the beginning and another one after the break.