The Army of Love training camp takes place from Wednesday 11 October to Saturday 14 October in Utrecht. The camp consists of a closed daytime segment that thirty participants subscribed to via our open call and through past engagement with Army of Love. During the week, we will engage in intimate workshops and discussions by way of our experts who will help us discover what the Army could be. Some of our thematic workshops include “Touching Tenderly” with Marije Janssen and Dennis Bontje, “When Sex is Care” with Loet Berkelmans from FleksZorg, and “Decolonizing Beauty” with the Beauty Collective of University of Colour.
 
For those who weren’t able to commit to the camp week but are still interested, we have a nighttime segment of the camp that is open to the public! Please join us for one or all of the three evening programs. See the details below and RSVP for each event individually. Special note that the events take place at ZIMIHC Theater Wittevrouwen and Parnassos Cultuurcentrum because they are on-grade, wheelchair-accessible spaces. Hope to see you there!

Wednesday 11 October, 19:30 hrs
Love Commons, Make Way for Winged Eros, and Other Intimate Matters
Conversation with Ingo Niermann and Dora García

ZIMIHC Theater Wittevrouwen, Bouwstraat 55, 3572 SP Utrecht
Travel time from Utrecht Centraal: 13 minutes by bus
Please let us know you’re coming using this RSVP form.
 
This conversation will include short presentations by Niermann and García on the “love commons” and Alexandra Kollontai (an often overlooked but crucial figure in the Bolshevik revolution who talked about affect as a political tool) respectively, and others who would like to share their related research. Writer Ingo Niermann, author of the novel Complete Love, and artist Dora García, who recently hosted the program “Lo Inadecuado & su Laboratorio del Amor” in Barcelona, Spain, are part of Army of Love and have co-organized the training camp with Casco.

Thursday 12 October, 20:15 hrs
Screening of Community Action Center by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner
(2010, 69 minutes, United States, English)
Post-screening discussion with Jules Sturm

Parnassos Cultuurcentrum, Kruisstraat 201, 3581 GK Utrecht
Travel time from Utrecht Centraal: 11 minutes by bus
Please let us know you’re coming using this RSVP form.
 
Community Action Center by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner is a sociosexual video that illustrates the erotics of community, where the personal is not only political, but sexual. Interested in expanding notions of sex and the term “porn,” the artists acknowledge that sexuality and gendered bodies are inherently political: “queer sex and feminist agency is a shared acknowledgment of reciprocal penetration.” After the screening, Jules Sturm will lead us in conversation about the film and ways we can complicate how we talk about bodies. Sturm is an independent researcher and teaches at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam on critical theories of the body. Her research interests are in interdisciplinary approaches to societal problems of difference and embodiment informed by posthumanism, disability studies and queer theory. She is the author of Bodies We Fail: Productive Embodiments of Imperfection (2014).

Friday 13 October, 19:30 hrs
Militant Love: on Community, Care, Activism and Fucking
Conversation with Olave Basabose and Manon la Decadence

ZIMIHC Theater Wittevrouwen, Bouwstraat 55, 3572 SP Utrecht
Travel time from Utrecht Centraal: 13 minutes by bus
Please let us know you’re coming using this RSVP form.
 
Olave Basabose and Manon la Decadence will host a discussion on different forms of relationships and methods of care that take place within activist communities. Olave Basabose: Black, vegan, non-binary trans-femme, queer, feminist, lawyer, entrepreneur, Umurundikazi, neuro-atypical, poor and dogged Romantic. Manon la Decadence studied humanistics but is better known as a genderclown, hosting safer spaces in Rotterdam with their GenderBendingQueerParty and Get a Room! events at WORM, and talks and support groups at The Hang-Out 010 and Adem Inn. They identify as queer and this also involves a daily practice of queer failure and ethics of care.