Absolute Love

Absolute Love was a performance program curated by Camilo Godoy, bringing together artists Oluwadamilare (Dare) Ayorinde, Joselia “Jo” Hughes, and Zachary Tye Richardson. The program was presented in conjunction with Visual AIDS' summer exhibition Altered After, curated by Conrad Ventur at Participant, Inc.

Each artist presented performance work engaged with the intersection of lust, love, illness, and legacy. Ayorinde danced using improvisation, voice and humor to challenge history. Hughes performed writings that reflect on living with Sickle Cell Disease. Richardson transformed movement and language to create spaces for solidarity.

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Curator Camilo Godoy cites the writer Gary Fisher as an inspiration for the program:

So 9 tastes of male seed in two nights. I’m delirious.

I doubt if I’ll see him again, but it’s okay. I guess you learn to love life in bits and you have to look at the people you meet in just that way—tiny sparkling bits of a whole gem.

I’m looking at my arm and I don’t trust what I just said. There is a geometry to this, a poetry too. If I didn’t know it was cancer and AIDS I’d say my arm—my right arm—is interesting, attractive. —Gary Fisher¹

"The lustful and melancholic thoughts written by Gary Fisher in his journals, notebooks and poems have been persistently on my mind. His passionate sincerity confronted being a Black gay man living with AIDS in this racist and homophobic society. When Conrad Ventur invited me to organize this performance series I thought of Gary and desired that he was alive so that I could invite him to read from his work. When I started meeting with artists to invite to participate in this series, I brought up Gary’s raging view of the world. His writings were a source for our conversations.

Gary Fisher died of AIDS-related complications in 1994 at the age of 32. His work was unpublished until his friend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick organized his writings into a book published two years after his death. Gary ended a letter to Sedgwick by writing “Absolute love.” This performance program borrows these two words as a title to consider “love as the practice of freedom.”² The political moment that Gary inhabited and described parallels the terrifying and violent conservative moment that we are currently living in. Absolute Love invites these artists to explore their practice in relation to the writings by Gary Fisher and in the context of Altered After to observe and resist the catastrophe of this historical moment."

—Camilo Godoy

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[1] Journal entries by Gary Fisher; published in Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University Press, 1996.

[2] bell hooks, “love as the practice of freedom,” The Outlaw Bible of American Essays, edited by Alan Kaufman. New York: Basic Books, 2006, 317-24.

Performers

Oluwadamilare (Dare) Ayorinde is Nigerian - North American freelance creating dance artist living in New Jersey. Since Rutgers University he has worked with Colleen Thomas, Bill Young, Netta Yerushalmy, Company Stefanie Batten Bland, Kayla Farrish, Douglas Dunn, The Trisha Brown Dance Company and his dear friends Kyle Marshall Choreography and Miriam Gabriel + Carlo Antonio Villanueva. This year Dare is Dance on the Lawn's fifth Emerging Commissioned New Jersey Choreographer.

Joselia "Jo" Hughes is a Black 1.5-generation Cuban-Jamaican-Guyanese-American writer and artist from the Bronx. She lives with Sickle Cell Disease (HBSC) and ADHD. Utilizing various writing disciplines (critical essays, fiction, memoir, poetry, tweet threads), drawing, painting, photography, zine making, archival study and biospiriphysical engagement, Joselia simultaneously works to untangle linguistic ties that seek to oppress bodies, minds and spirits while also providing work that imagines and concretizes different and liberated futures. Often guided by the shape of her cells, Joselia works to center embodied focus and provides insight into the body as a machine, an honorable spiritual vessel, a garden for radical change, an amazing opportunity for meaningful survival.

Zachary Tye Richardson is a Brooklyn based artist who is interested in physical investigations, including but not limited to: movement, voice, theatre, and fashion. Richardson explores their concepts through movement designs that are created for the viewer's personal interpretation. He is intrigued with somatic relations and how they associate with emotional connectivity. Richardson has shown work at The Living Gallery Brooklyn, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Long Gallery Harlem, Gibney, Movement Research, WAXworks, American College Dance Festival and Dance Canvas Atlanta.

Curator

Camilo Godoy is an artist born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York, United States. He is a graduate of The New School with a BFA from Parsons School of Design, 2012; and a BA from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, 2013. Godoy was a 2018 Session Artist, Recess; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, Leslie-Lohman Museum; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, coleção moraes-barbosa; 2017 Artist-in-Residence, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP); among others. His work has been presented in New York in public space as a billboard and at venues such as Brooklyn Museum, CUE, Danspace Project, New York; and Mousonturm, Frankfurt; among others.