Definitions

Methods 


  • Bibliographical research
    about “radical tenderness“ & the performitivity of affection, hospitality and care 
     
  • Participatory experiments 
    exploring in-tender-actions
     
  • Self-exploration of the tender body by performing in public space
    experiencing tenderness in the public & thinking through my own skin
     
  • Creative writing
    in order to question and challenge our understandings of love, relationships, affection and intimacy collectivel

  • Tender Walks
    Observation of tenderness in the public space in order to research how it can be explored and translated into performances

 Reference: “Radikale Zärtlichkeit. Warum Liebe politisch ist.“ (2021) by Şeyda Kurt

 

Simultaneity of Radicality and Tenderness:  

 

“In the main title of my book, I chose the term tenderness over love. Why? Tenderness and love are both substantives. But it seems to me, that the word tenderness underlies a more direct request- the one of actually acting tender. I see tenderness, where humans are tender with each other, very specific, and this tenderness can have many different forms. Still, it is always guided by an action: By talking, by looking, by a movement, that - depending on the agreement- doesn’t always has to be soft or cautious. It is about an action, that plays to another person, plays with him/her, affirmative and productive, without wanting to harm him/her. When thinking about tenderness, nobody thinks about violence.“

[...]

“I don’t want to only live tenderness in my own relationships, I want to question its conditions beyond that. Because you can’t talk about tenderness, while remain silent about violence beyond your own relationships.

The objective cannot just be tenderness. I want to think more consequently. It has to be about radical tenderness. I understand radical tenderness as a program of justice. A justice of tenderness in one’s own relationships, in the apparently most private scope and beyond that, is just possible, when it applies for everybody.“ (Kurt, 2021)


Intercorporeality

—> “to describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies’“ (p.5, Thinking through the skin)