ArtificialFriendship

artificial friendship

Lilia Mestre

Dear you,

How are you? Here is an excerpt of a letter I wrote during the first confinement, April 2020 when I was invited by Roselle Pineda / PCI to give a talk about curatorial approaches in time of halting and transformation. I would like to share this with you because I’m interested in what you think about it.

My practice as a curator consists of creating a correspondence between several artistic researchers through a combination of presentations and writing practice. We address each other not directly as in a normal feedback activity, but with the delay of the letter, the delay of reflecting on what a critical response could be and how we want to formulate it, with which language.

The delay of the letter produces criticality as a modality of care. I’m holding on to you, while responding to your work. I carry you with me. I think through you. You change me. I’m totally in love with the idea that a critical world is a world of change. An inclusive environment of transformation.

I call for artificial friendship.

This concept is a paradox, a provocation, and an attempt to give attention to how to engage with concerns, people and materialities that are not ours and might not seem interesting at first view because they don’t address us directly.

I call for artificial friendship, and here you are. I open up the potential of friendship with you to be able to make myself available to write to you. I’ve been thinking about the concept of artificial friendship after creating scores (see: scoring) as an infrastructure for encounter in which I could observe and experiment with a relational shift in the approach to others. A mode of relation that is based on taking seriously, and accepting as a valuable companion in life, that what doesn’t correspond directly to my understanding of the world. To take into consideration not the symbiotic but intra-dependent relationships, the close and the far at the same time. The known and the unknown and the in-between.

I call for artificial friendship as a form of dedication to the unknown. A form of care for the ones we don’t know. Dear stranger, how are you? How do you feel? What do you do?

I’ve been asking myself; how can friendship and artificiality be partners towards an infrastructure of care for the other. Paradoxical at first instance, both these concepts, if allied, can create the conditions for a sociability of commitment, dedication, attention, patience, and inclusion. I have been working with scores, in their artificiality, to set a series of scheduled moments in time and space with clear constraints, where one can perform what friendship does, and even become art[ificial] friends, without there having to be a friendship in the first place.

This is an invitation to spend time together. To meet in a place that offers availability and the moment of being present to each other. The sort of agreement one can commit to when visiting a friend. I would like to propose that we think thoroughly about this when we think about curatorial and performing approaches. About spaces and conditions that introduce forms of attendance that are not consumeristic but involve the vulnerability of coming together, as a form of care for the other. A form of care for a complex societal ecosystem that can embrace change.

If you’d like to get back to me you can reach me at lilia@apass.be

Looking forwards to reading from you.

Warmly,

Lilia