In a time when sexual rights have largely come to signify marriage rights and a panoply of social benefits become available to those same sex couples that ratify their commitment in the eyes of the State, what forms of relating have been overlooked, ignored or declared illegitimate? From a critical perspective accepting to the legalizing power of the State may jeopardize personal and collective freedoms in profound ways that influence society and culture, what are these consequences? How does one feel love? How does one experience heartbreak or loss? Are feelings also regulated by bourgeois normativity? Can a space of affective and critical resistance be reclaimed? Can we return to communality, marginality, promiscuity, broader notions of the family, non-binary relations, etc. as “respectable” ways of life? What is an alternative relationship? Are there other possibilities? The presentations were followed by an extended afternoon session of dialogue and collective brainstorming with participants and attendees. The Empire of Love: Alternative Relationships and Other Possibilities is initiated by artist Carlos Motta in the context of his exhibition For Democracy There Must Be Love at Röda Sten Konsthall. Presentor: Erika Alm and Ellie Nordfeldt Title: What's sex got to do with it? ”In times oriented towards politics of assimilation, representation, and state recognition, we find it urgent to address the fact that the subversive potential in queer intimacies is often attached to different aspects of sexuality, as if the very potential for cultural change is anchored in non-conformative sexual identities, sexual relations and sexual expressions themselves. Sexuality is positioned as that which identifies the subject as non-conformant but also as that which is the foundation of its queerness, that which will set it free from normative structures. With such a focus on sexuality as the driving force for cultural change it is very important to keep a critical eye on the taken for granted assumptions about the relationship between sexual identity and gender identity and gender expression. How do cisnormative and gender binary ideals structure not only heteronormative politics of recognition and oppression, but also homonormative assimilation politics, and sometimes even queer radical politics of subversion?” Presentor: Katarina Bonnevier Title: comme-il-faut ”This presentation moves reluctantly and possibly bravely (like a moth attracted by the light) around the painful trust of a decently queer relationship. It comes out of the, for someone with my set of preferences, intriguing era of salons and boudoirs at the turn of last century. Knowing the salons as theatrical spaces of intimacy and same sex desire, where decency is a masquerade that both shields and discloses in a realm that lies beside polite society.” Presentors: Transmilitanta Brigaden Title: Trans Sensual Mass Hypnosis ”At the symposium, Transmilitanta Brigaden will perform a mass hypnosis on all present. An untested but effective method to open up the sexual politics chakra of the artistic academic class.” Presentor: Mathias Danbolt Title: "Intimate Constellations / Constellations of Intimacy: Mapping Attachments with Ester Fleckner’s I Navigate in Collisions” ”How to imagine forms of belonging beside the cultural models of attachment that dominate “the empire of love”? Inspired by sociologist Eva Illouz’s criticism of the powerful institutional arrangements that shape forms of modern love, these series of notes turn to the aesthetic in search for alternative constellations of intimacy. Thinking alongside Ester Fleckner’s series of woodcuts I Navigate in Collisions (2014), the presentation meditates on the conditions for intimacy in times of Grindr and Brenda, erotic capital and sexual capitalism, compulsory coupledom and utter loneliness. Shuttling between the diaristic and the theoretical, the private and the political, the presentation meditates on the importance of rethinking the architecture of attachments in the search of sustaining other modes of living.” Presentor: Al Masson Title: “Greek love, a tourist visit” ”Just having been back from a one month in residency at the Danish Institute in Greece, I want to play and share some personal materials I collected there. Greece antiquity has been “my revelation” like probably many others in my homosexuality. As an adolescent my fantasy was Odysseus. Hector was my love. Being in the land of “Greek love”, was so interesting not only confronted with the actual caricature crisis of the capitalist failure, but also interacting with gay and non-gay people. This happened under the intimidating grandeur of the Acropolis, few steps from the Agora. Everything in the religious aspect of Greek antiquities is related to nature, from Zeus and thunder and sun to Apollo; sexuality, desire and its diversities had also their right places among deities. Observing Greek social structure with pressure from the family nuclear tradition and the power of the Orthodox Church has been also challenging. How the Greeks play with “the other space of desire”? This in comparison to Scandinavia for example with the more “advance” gay rights and the getting into mainstream “normality” and how this in Greece is not yet the case! In a way there was something exciting and nostalgic about how Greeks in general (not the far right for sure!) seems to handle the “diversity of sexual spaces”. Perhaps having kept this ancient feeling for “nature” influenced by Antiquities?”