Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann
“Army of Love”
Introduced by Ingo Niermann
HD film, sound, 40'
Year: 2016
Romantic love is saturated with commoditization. The socialistic premise behind “free love” crumbles when desiring competition gets in the way, and in the age of hook-up apps, the possibility of free sex represents the liberalization, not the liberation, of love. Army of Love introduces a propositional regiment of soldiers diverse in age and appearance and tasked with solving the persistent social malaise of dire loneliness.
Extract from Solution 257: Complete Love. A Novel by Ingo Niermann, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2016 – a prequel of the Army of Love:
“Hey,” she said, “can you see the tents at Alex already?”
In fact, they’d just passed the TV Tower. Now the park around the Marx-Engels monument was entering Karl’s field of vision. The brightly colored tents of the Love Garden had been covering the area from here to the temporary grass on the site of the former-future Stadtschloss for over a week.
“Yeah, they’re still there.”
“Can you do me a big favor? Get out for a second and go into one?”
“As you like.”
They were taking a left onto Spandauer Straße. Karl was somewhat curious after all. Since last winter, in metropolises in the Arab world and then in Europe, people were protesting for more democracy and justice—students, retired people, young doctors, and tourists united happily. The heart of the protest was a constantly occupied public space—Tahrir Square, Plaça de Catalunya, Rothschild Boulevard—where rather than spouting prefabricated slogans, protestors had to first discuss exact objectives. Of course this enthusiasm was bound to wane all too soon, and demonstrators were starting to get on each other’s nerves. So they had enjoyed seizing the moment all the more. But in Berlin things stayed quiet; apparently, the living costs weren’t high enough yet. Early twentysomethings from all over the world came here to realize their creative potential and hang out in spacious, affordable apartments. Waiting tables, welfare, or parental support were enough to keep them more or less afloat. Cautious attempts to set up a few tents at Alex were immediately broken up by brutal police crackdowns, and no one had gotten too upset.
Then a few people who were involved with Bar 25, which had closed the year before, had the idea that the protests should have an agenda all their own. Instead of centering around financial and legal issues, the focus would instead have to shift to private life. The hippies had only tried to liberate sex and love. Now it had to be about distributing them fairly. Therefore you’d need to renegotiate the whole thing and hold workshops to explore what love and sex actually are in the first place. The theories of Marx and Engels had simply omitted mankind’s greatest happiness. It wasn’t just money that ruled the world—attractiveness did too. Beauty and charm couldn’t be redistributed any more than intelligence and entrepreneurial ambition—except what you got for it could. And it wasn’t just the money and property (those generally considered beautiful earned 10 to 20 percent above the average salary) but love and sex as well. They called this approach completism.
The Lexus pulled to a stop, double-parking again. Karl got out and walked toward the tents. He was tired of these temporary public interventions, where something was always being tacked together or set up somewhere that you had to duck into, or where you had to climb up or slide down something, only to end up standing around with all the other cultural theorists, architects, and artists, holding a bottle of beer. Going out in Berlin increasingly seemed reduced to standing around outside with a legal beer bottle in hand. Karl wasn’t thirty yet but he hadn’t been clubbing in years. The same was true of friends his age without kids. No new clubbers had taken their place. The early-twenties crowd preferred to hang out by the corner stores—it was cheaper and a tame imitation of street gangs.
Karl turned his phone around and did a slow pan over the park. Every tent was dedicated to a certain topic, written on the side in capital letters. SEX WITH THE ELDERLY, SEX AMONG THE ELDERLY, LOVING THE HANDICAPPED, PEDOPHILIA, SADOMASOCHISM, EROTOMANIA, THE FETISH CHARACTER OF LOVE, DECEIT, TRANSGENDER, AMPUTEE LOVERS, LOVING NOT LEASING, and so on. Several tents had yet to be designated.
“You have a certain one in mind?”
“Just take the one in the front.”
“The blue one?”
“Why not.”
BEING IN LOVE OR BEING HORNY. Karl felt terribly uneasy when his hand grabbed the zipper to the tent entrance. What kind of person would sit there in a sticky tent in the middle of the day to talk to strangers and be petted? A blubber butt drenched in sweat? An emaciated vegan? But that’s exactly what it was about: that he should love these people too, stimulate them, and allow them to stimulate him. But to do this, shouldn’t they have made the conditions as conducive as possible? Wouldn’t a luxury spa be a better option?
He put his ear to the tent but couldn’t hear any voices. Should he just turn around and tell Ava that it was empty? Finally, since he was there already, he pulled himself together and pulled back the flap.
Credits
Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann, Army of Love, 2016
Cinematography Gernot Bayer
Music Alvin Aronson
Sound mix Jon Eckhaus
Styling Viviane Hausstein
Costumes Hood by Air
Cast: Anna Barbara, Ashiq Khondker, Cynthia Scholten, Hans Rosenfeldt, Ingo Niermann, Johanna Eck, Julieta Aranda, Leon Aranda, Marc Elsner, Marie Golüke, Matthias Vernaldi, Moritz Wulf, Stefan Weise, Stephanie Klee, Tarren Johnson, ZomaCrum-Tesfa
Commissioned and co-produced by the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
With additional support by Wiesbaden Biennale and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann
“Army of Love”
HD film, sound, 40'
Introduced by Ingo Niermann
Year: 2016
Romantic love is saturated with commoditization. The socialistic premise behind “free love” crumbles when desiring competition gets in the way, and in the age of hook-up apps, the possibility of free sex represents the liberalization, not the liberation, of love. Army of Love introduces a propositional regiment of soldiers diverse in age and appearance and tasked with solving the persistent social malaise of dire loneliness.
Extract from Solution 257: Complete Love. A Novel by Ingo Niermann, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2016 – a prequel of the Army of Love:
“Hey,” she said, “can you see the tents at Alex already?”
In fact, they’d just passed the TV Tower. Now the park around the Marx-Engels monument was entering Karl’s field of vision. The brightly colored tents of the Love Garden had been covering the area from here to the temporary grass on the site of the former-future Stadtschloss for over a week.
“Yeah, they’re still there.”
“Can you do me a big favor? Get out for a second and go into one?”
“As you like.”
They were taking a left onto Spandauer Straße. Karl was somewhat curious after all. Since last winter, in metropolises in the Arab world and then in Europe, people were protesting for more democracy and justice—students, retired people, young doctors, and tourists united happily. The heart of the protest was a constantly occupied public space—Tahrir Square, Plaça de Catalunya, Rothschild Boulevard—where rather than spouting prefabricated slogans, protestors had to first discuss exact objectives. Of course this enthusiasm was bound to wane all too soon, and demonstrators were starting to get on each other’s nerves. So they had enjoyed seizing the moment all the more. But in Berlin things stayed quiet; apparently, the living costs weren’t high enough yet. Early twentysomethings from all over the world came here to realize their creative potential and hang out in spacious, affordable apartments. Waiting tables, welfare, or parental support were enough to keep them more or less afloat. Cautious attempts to set up a few tents at Alex were immediately broken up by brutal police crackdowns, and no one had gotten too upset.
Then a few people who were involved with Bar 25, which had closed the year before, had the idea that the protests should have an agenda all their own. Instead of centering around financial and legal issues, the focus would instead have to shift to private life. The hippies had only tried to liberate sex and love. Now it had to be about distributing them fairly. Therefore you’d need to renegotiate the whole thing and hold workshops to explore what love and sex actually are in the first place. The theories of Marx and Engels had simply omitted mankind’s greatest happiness. It wasn’t just money that ruled the world—attractiveness did too. Beauty and charm couldn’t be redistributed any more than intelligence and entrepreneurial ambition—except what you got for it could. And it wasn’t just the money and property (those generally considered beautiful earned 10 to 20 percent above the average salary) but love and sex as well. They called this approach completism.
The Lexus pulled to a stop, double-parking again. Karl got out and walked toward the tents. He was tired of these temporary public interventions, where something was always being tacked together or set up somewhere that you had to duck into, or where you had to climb up or slide down something, only to end up standing around with all the other cultural theorists, architects, and artists, holding a bottle of beer. Going out in Berlin increasingly seemed reduced to standing around outside with a legal beer bottle in hand. Karl wasn’t thirty yet but he hadn’t been clubbing in years. The same was true of friends his age without kids. No new clubbers had taken their place. The early-twenties crowd preferred to hang out by the corner stores—it was cheaper and a tame imitation of street gangs.
Karl turned his phone around and did a slow pan over the park. Every tent was dedicated to a certain topic, written on the side in capital letters. SEX WITH THE ELDERLY, SEX AMONG THE ELDERLY, LOVING THE HANDICAPPED, PEDOPHILIA, SADOMASOCHISM, EROTOMANIA, THE FETISH CHARACTER OF LOVE, DECEIT, TRANSGENDER, AMPUTEE LOVERS, LOVING NOT LEASING, and so on. Several tents had yet to be designated.
“You have a certain one in mind?”
“Just take the one in the front.”
“The blue one?”
“Why not.”
BEING IN LOVE OR BEING HORNY. Karl felt terribly uneasy when his hand grabbed the zipper to the tent entrance. What kind of person would sit there in a sticky tent in the middle of the day to talk to strangers and be petted? A blubber butt drenched in sweat? An emaciated vegan? But that’s exactly what it was about: that he should love these people too, stimulate them, and allow them to stimulate him. But to do this, shouldn’t they have made the conditions as conducive as possible? Wouldn’t a luxury spa be a better option?
He put his ear to the tent but couldn’t hear any voices. Should he just turn around and tell Ava that it was empty? Finally, since he was there already, he pulled himself together and pulled back the flap.
Credits
Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann, Army of Love, 2016
Cinematography Gernot Bayer
Music Alvin Aronson
Sound mix Jon Eckhaus
Styling Viviane Hausstein
Costumes Hood by Air
Cast: Anna Barbara, Ashiq Khondker, Cynthia Scholten, Hans Rosenfeldt, Ingo Niermann, Johanna Eck, Julieta Aranda, Leon Aranda, Marc Elsner, Marie Golüke, Matthias Vernaldi, Moritz Wulf, Stefan Weise, Stephanie Klee, Tarren Johnson, ZomaCrum-Tesfa
Commissioned and co-produced by the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
With additional support by Wiesbaden Biennale and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona