Jazz legend Nat King Cole’s hit number ‘L-O-V-E’, released posthumously in 1965, delivers a rather classic model of love in the modern era. It chants a love characterized by exclusivity (O cause you’re the only one I see), gloriousness (V is very, very extraordinary), and an unprecedented intensity (E is even more than anyone you adore). Love, as the song indicates, is both daily and exceptional, ‘enduring and transient, expansive and territorial, revolutionary and conservative’.[1] This ambiguity prevails in the discourse of love, which similarly baffles and infatuates us. It bestows divine blessing to privatized and propertied relations, forming the understructure of racialized states, atomized families, and individuals. Its valorization of possessiveness gives legitimacy to various forms of surveillance, censorship, and xenophobia while, ironically, promising hopes of freedom and unity. From the increasingly exclusionary narrative of religious supremacy, nationalism, and individualism to the rationalization of competition as the only means for happiness, success, and survival, and the withering of many lives, species, and ecologies for the sake of an anthropocentric world, our contemporary plights seem to be closely intertwined with the bewilderment of love.

If the dominant discourse of love today is tying us to the web of Western modernity and its biopolitics, perhaps one of the biggest illusions it offers is the impression that ‘we have always already known love’.[2] A quick glance into recent history shows how love shifts and changes under different initiatives and regimes, spanning from religious scriptures and commercial jingles to revolutionary champions and nationalistic slogans. Instead of a stable form of emotional ideal that is always already there, love is a verb that oscillates and conjugates. It mobilizes us into different movements and orders. It also carries an array of actions, creating myriad relations that weave us more intimately into the world. The question of how to love is, thus, to ask ‘how we can practice the rhythm of convergence, which we call love, by participating, with our senses, in the process of belonging to the world rather than it belonging to us’.[3]

Let’s start from the beginning. L is for the way you look at me.

We could, for now, start the act of love with a look. In an ontological sense, a look inaugurates the expansion of subjecthood. It is the experience of being in your gaze that brings me to experience my existence through the myriad correlations I participate in the world: I do not pre-exist these relations; I exist because of them. To look is thus to understand my tenderness and coarseness in relation to textures in other bodies, my bones and blood to rocks and soil, my respiration and pulses to winds and tides.

But, as Frantz Fanon reminds us, ‘every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society’.[4] To look is also to ask who gets to look and who is consistently subjugated to the role of passivity and voicelessness. How to reflect on the dominance of sight against other senses in our image-ridden world? How to look across sight-blocking categories, boundaries, and walls, into the invisible structures, histories, and worlds? To look is to learn and unlearn, to care and to be cared for. It is an effort to map the uneven terrain of a highly stratified world and to navigate it nevertheless. To love the world, amor mundi, is thus ‘a facing towards, a coming to terms with what has happened, however horrific, and what is happening’.[5]

L is for the Way You Look at Me unfolds a series of workshops, screenings, reading groups, and convivial events that shape Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s discursive programme between 2025 and 2027. Seeing discourse as a system of knowledge-production and meaning-making that comes into effect through the textual, the verbal, the aesthetic, and the somatic, this programme moves creatively across different disciplines while exploring the reimagination and re-enactment of love. From

2025–27, L is for the Way You Look at Me traces three consecutive yet interconnected themes: the microorganism, the human body, and the geological body. Across different bodies, scales, and domains of knowledge, the programme seeks to make perceptible some of the forgotten and unseen linkages and knots that invent, reinvent, and add to the experience, influence, and impulses of what we call love.

[1] Eleanor Wilkinson, ‘On love as an (im)properly political concept’, Environment and Planning D, 35/1 (2016), 57–71.

[2] Timothy Laurie and Hannah Stark, ‘How To Do Politics With Love’, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Conference for the Cluster for Organizations Society and Markets (COSM), University of Melbourne (24 September 2015), 1.

[3] Lauren Berlant, ‘A PROPERLY POLITICAL CONCEPT OF LOVE: Three Approaches in Ten Pages’, Cultural Anthropology 26 (2011), 684.

[4] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1952), 109.

[5] Tara McDowell, ‘Amor Mundi: Towards a Curatorial Ethics for Climate Crisis’, in Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2023), 257.