Our almost irreversibly poisoned world is being torn apart by humanitarian catastrophes, wars, and violence. Love is a powerful counterforce to the massive horrors that confront it: a love that reaches beyond the personal horizon into the unknown and breaks through the apathy of indifference, bringing change, and opening up pathways out of the crisis. Deeply embedded in the history of humanity, our emotions, actions, and hopes arise from love: energies that are vital for forming personal and collective bonds and for building the future. The (hi)stories and representations of love give universal form to individual emotions. They continue to be reshaped in the inventions and creations of art.
There are many languages of love. While ancient Greek culture distinguished between six different terms for love, from sensual to selfless love, the indigenous Makassar people on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have nearly 25 expressions for love, differentiating between a wide spectrum of familial, caring, and romantic love, which the word stands for in most societies around the world today.1 Long before, and also simultaneously with the western constructions of love that arose from antiquity in the Renaissance, figurations of love emerged across the globe in literature and art.2 The now globally circulating western paradigm of love springs forth from the paradox of a passion that is stoked by maintaining the utmost distance from the object of its desire.
Framed in the codes of chivalrous refinement, in which the troubadours composed their paeans to idealized womanhood at the courts of medieval southern France, the dualistic celebration of love spread throughout Europe in the 16th century through the lyrical invocations of unfulfilled longing conceived by the Italian poet and early humanist Francesco Petrarch. During the Renaissance revival of antiquity, the visual and poetic representations of love as a force of fate gained traction that ambushes its victims and robs them of their sanity, while promising supreme happiness, inspiration, and gratification. The dialectical dynamic of this intrinsically unattainable form of love follows a contradictory logic that unites heaven and hell, euphoria and deepest sorrow, hope and despair in the enamored subject in an indissoluble tangle of conflicting emotions: “I’m froze by summer, scorched by winter’s frost.”3
The Rebirth of Love from the Spirit of the Common
To this day, “love as amour passion,”4 which, formed into a permanent loop of unfulfillment and multiply reshaped over the centuries, is not only specific to the western romantic couple constellation, is still expressed in the traditional words and figurations of its beginnings. Permanently ignited in poetry and art and reverberating as an ideal through day dreams and nocturnal fantasies, it has long been profitably brought into circulation—condensed into mass-reproduced desires and promotionally effective emblems. Love itself, however, evades the ultimate consumption of the “romantic utopia”5 , as Eva Illouz titled her examination of the entanglements of love within the “cultural contradictions of capitalism.”
As a transtemporal, transcultural, and transpersonal power, love remains resistant to hegemonic appropriation and attempts at its homogenization as well as to the usurpation efforts of the commodity and entertainment industries, which seek to cash in on its hope- and happiness-inducing qualities. Even the traditional contradictory constructions of its elevation are unable to tame the primal subversive energies of love. In our globalized, crisis-ravaged, ecologically almost irrevocably endangered world, the birth of love from the spirit of antiquity, which lies at the beginning of its genesis in European cultural history, is now succeeded by the birth of love from the spirit of a sense of communality without boundaries.
Love as a Social Force
Having broken out of the endless loop of romantic yearning, love reveals itself as a social form of interaction and a “mechanism of society as a whole,” which it has always been beyond its programmatic aesthetic and economically motivated stylizations and immobilizations: a “medium of communication,” as Niklas Luhmann describes it, which not only provides “solid points of support” in intimate relationships and makes it easier to resolve “problems with communication within a relationship,” but makes it possible “to engage in common, or at least cooperative, action in an environment which has become complicated and presents such rapidly changing conditions that the response called for is rarely clear in advance, cannot be defined in morally unequivocal terms and cannot always be agreed between the partners from one case to the next, but rather has to occur in spontaneous harmony.”6
This idea of love as a unifying force of collaborative action in the social sphere has analogies to Michael Hardt’s idea of love as a political “practice” that is extended “beyond the couple and the family to the entire social field.”7 Hardt opposes the “capitalist logic and the relations of private property,” according to which individual desire and its projection onto the respective object of love is also organized, and argues for a form of love that reaches beyond possessiveness and is based on the “transformative quality” of collective political action.8 : an action-based concept of love that takes effect in the concrete reality of everyday life.
Love as Collectivity in Diversity
Several factors are central to Hardt’s understanding of love as a political practice. In addition to the transformation that occurs in “our political encounters together” and its underlying activist impulse, the potential of love to broaden the capacity for thought and action is also crucial. The experience of happiness brought about by the expansion of perception in the course of collective actions and thought processes is prefigured in Baruch Spinoza’s concept of love. Another essential point in Hardt’s approach is “a notion of love that is based on the other, or on multiplicity, or on differences” instead of an exclusive “love of sameness, and love of your own, and love of the same.”9 ]
This concept of love that expresses itself as a transformative and transformational action alliance in multiplicity finds resonance in current collaborative practices spanning countries and different groups such as the global Youth for Climate Movement. Bridging the gap between emotions and rationality in Hardt’s (or also Spinoza’s) sense, young climate activists are fighting for the survival of the planet and all living beings inhabiting it out of love, as Louise Knops notes: “It is love which enables activists to cross human-nonhuman boundaries and create a subject that goes beyond their individualities.”10
Collective Connectivity as a Holistic Principle
An increased involvement in collective processes, interconnectedness, and collaborative creation in the social sphere also arises today from a new, holistic understanding of the world as an integral part of the universe. Suzi Gablik describes this holistic worldview in her book The Reenchantment of Art as the awareness of a comprehensive sense of interrelatedness, which forms a contrast to the western dualism of the Cartesian mind-body split: “The essence of the new paradigm emerging in physics, general systems theory and ecology changes our whole idea of reality with the notion of interconnectedness—an understanding of the organic and unified character of the universe.”11 For Gablik, this holistic understanding is the prerequisite for a new mode of perceiving and existing that not only affects the individual, but also the shaping of social reality, and “is constructed from the way our private beliefs and intentions merge with those of others.”12 She believes, however, that a change in thinking must first take place individually, before social change is possible: “The source of creativity in society is the person. Where individuals and social transformation converge is in this personal breakthrough to a new way of seeing. Both the problem and the level at which the solution emerges are manifested initially in the individual, who is also an organ of the collective.”13
According to Gablik, the paradigm shift she envisions towards a “reenchantment of art” in the awareness of a holistic interconnection between individuals and collectives, humans, nature, the world, and the cosmos takes places between the coordinates of social engagement, ecological awareness, an “ethic of care”, and a “remythologizing of consciousness” based on a “feminine ethos,” which frees itself from the narrowness of Cartesian dualism: thoughts that Chus Martinez takes up when, in her essay “The Age of Love: Notes toward a Nonbinary World,” she perceives an essential contribution of artists today in “an interpretation of life as a practice, a practice of mutually productive relations of knowledge, thought, and care giving […] within shifting relations of power” and correspondingly looks for a new “imagination of immanence, of epistemological togetherness, of freedom and love”14 in current philosophical thought.
From an Expanded Concept of Love to Artistic Practice
The expanded concept of love, which Hardt proposes as a social concept of collective bonds and interactions, has parallels to the expanded concept of art as social sculpture developed by Joseph Beuys, who defined society as a collaboratively created work of art. Collective participation in social processes is essential to both of these approaches: Love, art, and society manifest themselves as processual works-in-progress that are constantly evolving and changing. Hardt’s transformative notion of love contains a creative perspective that can be found today both in the sphere of political activism and in activist artistic concepts and working methods.
Political love was also a decisive impulse propelling the project Das Archipel that was launched in 2015 in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, a collective experimental field consisting of pontoon islands that floated in Hamburg’s waterways until 2022. The initiators Finn Brüggemann, Amalia Ruiz-Larrea, and Nuriye Tohermes, at the time students at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), conceived Das Archipel as “an open platform for self-organization” with the following vision: “Das Archipel is the sum of the thoughts and actions that develop with it, around it, and through it.”15
. Their collaborative open space linked directly to the political concept of love, which Hardt already formulated in early publications with Antonio Negri as an essential driving force of collective action in the social sphere: “Without this love, we are nothing.”16
In the 2018 book Das Archipel – Archipel I, which describes the origins, contexts, and manifestations of the “temporary autonomous zone,” a chapter is dedicated to the topic of “Politics and Love”17 . The “Statements about Love” contained in it were written by Marjetica Potrč, then professor of the class for participatory social practices, Design for the Living World, at the Hamburg HFBK, Finn Brüggemann, and Nuriye Tohermes, who has been part of the collaborative public green space project PARKS since 2018. The text is from a video that was shown alongside a diagram and a manifesto on “Politics and Love,” as well as a performance with a sound installation, by the class of Marjetica Potrč and Das Archipel in 2017 in the context of the anniversary exhibition The History Show at the Kunstverein Hamburg.

Diagram on Politics and Love, mapping of a joint discussion by the class Design For The Living World, Prof. Marjetica Potrč, at HFBK Hamburg 2017 and Das Archipel
The Circle Widens
When artists today give shape to their immediate experience of systemic repression, social upheaval, war, and dislocation, they do so not only from a position of personal concern, but frequently also proceed on the basis of political love, which serves as a medium of an expanded concept of art that incorporates multi-perspectival, participatory, and interactive forms of expression, processes, and interconnections in the work. Love takes effect here as a social practice of creative encounters of differences and the creation of bonds through collaborative action and mutual participation in the struggle against capitalist, power-driven structures of oppression and conflict. Communication and interaction thus manifest themselves as vehicles of multi-voiced artistic expression.
This is also the case in the ongoing series of collectively realized events, Cooking with Mama, conceived by the Kurdish Iraqi artist and immigrant to Germany, Hiwa K, who invites people to gather for meals as a means of overcoming spatial and interpersonal distance through the sharing of stories and memories. The Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh has been collecting words of love since 2019, interweaving different languages and cultures into a collective narrative in a growing compilation of wall writings and embroideries titled In Love in Blood – بالحبّ بالدّم, while Mexican artist
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger deconstructs and recodifies western emblems of love in her decolonial critique of capitalist structures and lets these soar as winged beings into a cosmic freedom.
Resistance, emancipation, and transformation of women living in the shadow of the war in Sudan are central themes of the artist Amna Elhassan, who gives luminous expression to collective female empowerment and resilience in her paintings and installations. Isaac Chong Wai, a transmedia and performance artist who was born in Hong-Kong, in turn raises a white flag bearing the designation Leaderless as an over-arching gesture of opposition against repression and institutionalized violence. Chicago-based artist Dan Peterman has been incorporating recycling processes into his ecological and sociopolitical investigations since the 1980s. With his interactive Love Podium he encourages an expansion of private dialogue into public discourse: a call for active participation in the social sphere.
As the Hamburg artist Sabine Mohr, who took part in the Art-of-Peace Biennale in Hamburg in 1985 with the interactive symbol of a string game has stated, “Peace is an active process that requires incessant action and creation.”18 This applies in equal measure to the collective artwork of society, to art itself, and to love in all of its manifestations, but above all in its actions as a political practice. Love expands the spaces of our inner existence and transcends the boundaries between reality and art, the self and the other, individuals and the collective, between times and places, life and death. Its paths lead from utmost intimacy into infinite expanses. Its essence is freedom; its impetus is imagination; its expression is creation. Every person is an artist19 : As lovers in a political sense, we carry out love into the world together.
Dr. Belinda Grace Gardner holds a master’s degree in literature and a PhD in art theory. She is based in Hamburg as an art theorist, writer, university teacher, and independent curator. Her fields of specialization include figurations of the ephemeral, constructions of love, and social activism in contemporary art. She has published extensively in catalogues and books, as well as in print, radio, and online media, and has curated numerous exhibitions in local and international institutions, among these Politics of Love (2024/2025), realized in collaboration with Anna Nowak at the Kunsthaus Hamburg.
- 1 Cf. Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Eva-Maria Engelen (eds.): “Tell me about love,” Kultur und Natur der Liebe. Paderborn: mentis, 2006, pp. 62
- 2 Cf. Nicolas Baumard, Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil, Lou Safra: “The Cultural Evolution of Love in Literary History,” Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, 6 (4), pp. 506-522: hal.science/hal-03860431v2/file/Baumard%202022%20The%20cultural%20evolution%20of%20love%20in%20literary%20history.pdf
- 3 Quoted after: Francesco Petrarch, Sonnet CII., transl. by Anon. (1777), The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch, transl. into Engl. verse by various hands, with a life of the poet by Thomas Campbell (ed.), London: George Bell and Sons, 1879: gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17650/pg17650-images.html
- 4 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Love. A Sketch, 1969, ed. by André Kieserling, transl. into Engl. by Kathleen Cross, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010, p. 24
- 5 Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, University of California Press, 1997
- 6 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Love. A Sketch, 1969, ed. by André Kieserling, transl. into Engl. by Kathleen Cross, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010, pp. 17-18
- 7 Cf. Michael Hardt, The Procedures of Love / Die Verfahren der Liebe. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, No. 068, Ger./Engl., ed. by dOCUMENTA (13) / documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012, p. 5: bettinafuncke.com/100Notes/068_Hardt.pdf
- 8 Cf. “Politics of Love as a Catalyst for Change,” a conversation between Michael Hardt and Belinda Grace Gardner, June 26, 2024: politics-of-love.kunsthaushamburg.de/en/kontexte/politics-of-love-as-a-catalyst-for-change
- 9 Cf. “Politics of Love as a Catalyst for Change,” a conversation between Michael Hardt and Belinda Grace Gardner, June 26, 2024: politics-of-love.kunsthaushamburg.de/en/kontexte/politics-of-love-as-a-catalyst-for-change
- 10 Cf. Louise Knops, “The new climate change activism is emotional, and it’s a good thing,” International Science Council (first published in: The Loop, March 3, 2021): https://council.science/blog/the-new-climate-change-activism-is-emotional-and-its-a-good-thing/)
- 11 Cf. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 22
- 12 Cf. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 22
- 13 Cf. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 23
- 14 Cf.: Chus Martinez, “The Age of Love: Notes toward a Nonbinary World”: politics-of-love.kunsthaushamburg.de/en/kontexte/the-age-of-love-notes-toward-a-nonbinary-world
- 15 Cf. the statement on the website of Das Archipel: dasarchipel.org/en/about.html
- 16 Cf. Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri, Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004, p. 352
- 17 Cf. “Politics and Love,” Das Archipel – Archipel I, ed. by Das Archipel, Hamburg 2018, print run: 130, pp. 20-26
- 18 Cf. “Invitation to an Interaction,” Sabine Mohr in a conversation with Belinda Grace Gardner: politics-of-love.kunsthaushamburg.de/en/biennale/aufforderung-zum-spiel
- 19 Cf. Joseph Beuys in: Georg Jappe, Beuys packen. Dokumente 1968–1996, Regensburg: Lindinger + Schmid, 1996, p. 125