Love against Lovers: Capitalist Crisis of Feeling

Following a screening of Maija Timonen's film Aune, or On Effective Demise (2013) that took place at The Showroom in January 2013 this related seminar will make connections between the financial crisis, the commodification of relationships, the ideological dimension of love, psychopathologies of gender and the idea that personal is political.

The seminar will include presentations by Kerstin Stakemeier (writer and teacher, Berlin/Munich), Hannah Black (artist and writer, London) and Maija Timonen (artist and writer, Berlin/London/Helsinki), followed by a discussion moderated by Josephine Berry-Slater (Editor, Mute Magazine, London).

This conversation can now be listened to online here

At 5.30pm Timonen's film Aune will be screened at The Cockpit Theatre studio space. Film information below:

Aune, or On Effective Demise (2013, 56min, HD)

Aune is a 19th century girl confined to her bed, living under the threat of amputation. She has dreams of a park that are both premonitions of the future and the site in which its absence is played out. An escalating sense of timelessness collapses Aune’s two realities, as her body takes on significance as a cipher of a larger process of dismemberment. A love story turns into a film about sex, death and the economy.

The film presents a limbo of sorts. Not exactly a postmodern play of signifiers, but something beyond that. What is being dealt with is perhaps a post-traumatic state: an illusion of suspension at a time when the disaster has already taken place and is merely hidden under a proliferation of images. The physical being of the main character Aune becomes burdened with competing interests. The extent to which not only her body, but also her subjectivity, is idealised, objectified and pathologised, is a central concern of the film.

Filmed in large part at Victoria Park, London, the film is a loose adaptation of 1896 novel 'Aune' by Finnish writer Immi Hellén.