Intimacy as curiosity.
At Studio Allegory, we are approaching intimacies and relationships from the perspective of curiosity. Nothing is a given. Our educational stream seeks to deconstruct the clichés and tropes of an intimacy that doesn’t work for many.
“To be intimate with someone is nothing but that: to make oneself familiar with them. The Latin intimare indicates, etymologically, this already. Over twelve years of teaching an intimate practice such as rope bondage, I have encountered a significant problem in this context. That which is familiar is considered close and it is this closeness, this proximity that seems to be widely understood as a precondition for the ability of making oneself familiar with one another. One could say that a very specific closeness to the subject is necessary, and any intimacy ceases to exist beyond a mysterious, undefined and yet demanded distance. This understanding of closeness as a precondition for intimacy is problematic on many levels, as it presumes not only so-called “able bodies” who can move closer to each other without barriers but also a natural hegemony of romantic love with its very specific codes and prescriptions of desire.
What if we take the call to make ourselves familiar with something or someone more literally and situate it in a seemingly different field of human endeavour?” (From Georg Barkas. My year in researching intimacy. Hazlitt magazine. 2023)
While we consider all our classes and events as something where intimacy can be experimented with and explored, we have also dedicated program for this specifically. Watch out for events from this category.
