Louis Schou-Hansen's "Pleasure" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.

Here you will find the documentation of Louis Schou-Hansen's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by  Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

Pleasure

Louis Schou-Hansen's question: Do you feel pleasure?  

Louis's introduction: Clem is an entirely fictional character obsessed with external conditions that keep re-animating its body. It is a hungry consumer of toxic histories; histories that keep circulating the world as ghostly repositories, wanting to eat them up and spit them back out into the world as counter-narratives and, at times, malfunctioning corporeal sequences.  

Clem keeps reiterating, and while recently contemplating, it fell into a rabbit hole on the www, geeking out on the celebrated American composer Charles Ives and how his homophobia slipped into his music. Eager to find pleasure in the unpleasurable, Clem has decided to perform a kind of dissident, dramatic, and weirdly homoerotic lap dance for the ghost of Ives, materializing in a soundtrack consisting of his songs The Unanswered Question, Processional. Let There Be Light, and Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass. It is a slow erotic meditation, dedicated to the pleasure of Clem and the displeasure of Ives, imagining his frowning specter, upset about the perverted corruption of his compositions.

Bethany's report: 

The audience is invited to sit on the stage floor, whilst the artist sits on spotlit plint in the center of the stage wearing long hair tucked under a cap, socks, and a skirt. The plinth’s presence evokes the classical idealization of sculpture, of valued objects and figures elevated for admiration in a gallery setting, challenging norms around art, beauty, and the role of the artist.

A slow, solemn classical piano begins, layered with subtle discordant and polyrhythmic elements. The performer allows the music to envelop them, starting with gentle, slow head movements, which grow more purposeful as the music crescendos. Their body responds to each note, tensing and relaxing, mimicking the sculptural solidity of classical Roman statues. Each movement is slow, purposeful, and exploratory, blending sculptural poses with juddering micro-movements that vibrate with intensity. These trembles and incremental shifts in posture simultaneously introduce a show of strength and skill, as if the artist is feeling their way into each position, negotiating comfort and discomfort. The tremble itself becomes a powerful gesture, embodying both strength and fragility, an essential vulnerability required to access deeper sensations of pleasure.

The artist extends upward, twisting classic poses into queered, iconoclastic takes on the male heroic figure. The trembling becomes more intentional, a polyrhythmic series of micro-movements that probe the edges of sensation, emphasizing not grandeur but the detail, intimacy, and negotiation within each pose. By rupturing these traditionally masculine, sculptural poses the performance invite questions on how are we sculpted by the oppressive and normative institutions that govern our lived existence, can we rupture these conditionings from the possibilities of a polyrhythmia? 

When the music pauses, the artist stands, performs a symbolic act of washing their face, and shifts into more traditionally feminine poses. Testing these out with precision, moving between twerking and robotic, mechanized gestures. Scratches, itches, and other human gestures punctuate these poses, emphasizing imperfection and bodily reality. The movements grow more fluid. The artist stretches, reaches, trembles, and shakes, as if discovering new possibilities within the body’s polyrhythmic cadence.

The lights rise fully, revealing the artist in the stark, unembellished clarity of post-desire. Trembling, yet grounded, they embody the subdued aftermath of pleasure—a moment stripped of pretension, where illusion dissolves, leaving only the quiet nakedness of being. There is no grandeur, no lingering ecstasy, just a calm, almost anticlimactic reality.

Antonia Majaca: Antonia thanks Louis for an incredible performance, noting that the opening question—“Do you feel pleasure?”—is a powerful one. She reflects on how our entry into the art world is often shaped by forms of education that condition us to think a certain way, particularly to seek out themes associated with the death drive, as Freud described. She speaks to the compulsion and repetition bound up in the death drive and emphasizes that, as we face planetary crises, it becomes crucial to access pleasure.

Antonia then explores what she calls “the unanswered question,” suggesting that the answer might lie in the idea of “let there be light”—a guiding notion for the performance’s impact on her. Drawing on Audre Lorde's concept of the erotic, she clarifies that the erotic is not merely pleasure. Instead, for Lorde, it’s a source of healing, wholeness, and collective freedom. This resonates with the performance’s character, Clem, who absorbs toxic histories, embodying both the unanswerable question and the potential for healing. Antonia suggests that while Clem may pose questions without clear answers, this shouldn’t deter us from searching, even though the art world sometimes fetishizes the question itself.

Antonia then asks how we might access pleasure in these uncertain times, presenting three vital questions: Who is deemed worthy of pleasure? When is someone allowed to access it, and with whom? These reflections tie pleasure to broader themes of worthiness, timing, and connection, inviting everyone to consider how pleasure can be reclaimed as a transformative force.

Inti Guerrero: Inti congratulates Louis warmly for their wonderful presentation, reiterating the question, “Do you feel pleasure?” Reflecting on his own role as an educator, Inti explains that his practice often involves throwing out references, acknowledging his own obsessive tendencies. He says that he will respond with a curatorial approach of associative connections, drawing in film, history, pop culture, and beyond. Inti notes an art historical reference in the way Louis’s androgynous body is positioned on a pedestal, presenting an alternative to dominant, masculine forms. He finds this portrayal of the body in dance particularly intriguing, comparing it to the work of Eszter Salamon and her choreography of gender fluidity, with attire and movements that navigate gender in a layered, compelling way.

He remarks on the use of a cap that renders Louis’s face indistinct, directing the focus to their movements and shadows, with moments that evoke the feel of silent cinema, capturing a different sense of temporality. Inti observes how the music initially recalls the silent film era, but then evolves, resembling the depth and weight of an organ, as it resonates with the space and architecture, creating an operatic effect. The performance, with its physicality, brings to mind pop culture references, particularly Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things, whose puppet-like, ventriloquist movements suggest a rebirth. For Inti, this transformation evokes a queer figure emerging to interrupt and expand identity. He references Visitors, a film where identities merge and interact within a household, suggesting that pleasure itself becomes a way to experience being differently, transcending conventional boundaries.

Ramon Amaro: Ramon begins by commending the powerful opening of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2024. Recently re-reading Ecologies of Experience by Massumi and Manning, he shares a quote about perception and the myriad ways we allow ourselves to experience. Reflecting on what he just witnessed, Ramon acknowledges the specific type of vulnerability and intimacy that the performance created, in which the environment felt concentrated, letting the audience see a spectrum of contrasts.

He notes that the performance wasn’t just about the fluidity of gender or movement, but about the disjunction that emerges within these, drawing attention to the act of thought as a form of self. Ramon questions the assumption that pleasure is automatically accessible simply because we are corporeal bodies. Instead, he suggests that we are conditioned by rigid, external processes that try to dictate what pleasure means, often expecting it to conform to a predetermined idea outside ourselves. He brings up a podcast on the intimacy of pleasure, remarking on how quickly we can dismiss relationships if intimacy doesn’t immediately align, overlooking that another person’s dreams could merge with our own, if given a chance.

Ramon sees in the performance an exploration of this clumsy, painful process of intimacy. He describes it as “a love song to the self,” imagining what it might mean to love oneself, to embrace one’s own colors and pleasures, even when they feel foreign or detached. He likens the disjunctive movements in the performance to a kind of robotic symphony that achieves a humanness, as if witnessing a nervous system in its chaotic, contingent form—an echo of Lorde’s idea of healing as an ongoing process. He wonders if pleasure is always tied to suffering and whether entering pleasure also requires engaging with pain, traditionally understood as leading to a calm release. He reflects on how we conceive of pleasure in humanistic and divine terms, a “divine pleasure” that perhaps can never be fully realized. Ramon suggests that, even within this conversation, pleasure might exist in the interaction with the impossibility of reaching a final, complete state. He concludes by appreciating the performance, noting that it gives symbolic form to this complexity, perhaps offering the closest glimpse we can get to love or what we conceive as love—and, he reflects, maybe that’s enough.

About: Louis Schou-Hansen

Louis Schou-Hansen's "Pleasure" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1th.

Find the overview of all 38 AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 here: Chameleon Orbit