Coronafuga.
Snapshots of intimacy. Sex, care, emptiness in the times of digital media communication.
A performative lecture about embodiment, pleasure and representation.
Ewa Majewska, Sergio Frutos and Natalia Żychska
Digital dating, online sex and gaming smoothly became parts of our daily experiencing of intimacy. The sending of videos, pictures and graphics, even words, by everyday internet users globally, add another layer to Joseph Beuys’ claim that “everyone is an artist”. We all co-create our intimacy, gendered embodiment and pleasure, and while conforming to some code, we often also violate others. Do we follow the divisions and hierarchies of visual cultures or perhaps create an online utopia? Is our experience of digital intimacy exceptional, or do we follow similar scripts? Is there space for creativity in a world, where visual subordination leads to such phenomena as the “insta face” or “tiktok gesture”?
The “Snapshots of intimacy” project invites to rethink our models of dating, representing and sharing intimate moments in conversation with feminist artists – Żychska and Frutos, and writer-theorist – Majewska, who all created their ways of portraying these singular and shared moments of everyday sexual, private and embodied moments. Can pleasure be captured? How to paint everyday, shared intimacy? How to render it in words, as dialogue rather, that scientific description? Are these efforts emancipatory?
Come join us in the discussion and presentation of our projects, which offer examples of finding words, paintings, frames and performances of today’s intimacy in its everyday, ordinary, common practice. This unheroic polyvocal exchange is meant to enhance our thinking, grasping and immersion in a variety of practices, which all uphold emancipatory, egalitarian common ground for all bodies, all genders, all complexions and all shapes.
Sergio Frutos – critical painter. In Digital Intimacies and Live Show series of paintings he catches the moments of everyday intimacy. Born in Saragossa, he studied painting and photography at the Art Academy Madrid. Between 2014-2017 he run the art residency GlogauAIR in Berlin, he co-founded the collective Raum E116 (2009), with collective works, annual exhibitions and artbooks. He uses the strategies of archivist, flaneur and documentalist, focusing on the ordinary, capitalism’s contradictions and the spectacular logic of commodification. His paintings were shown at the IAACC Museum Pablo Serrano, König Galerie, Meisterschüler Galerie, Art von Frei Galerie, Raum E116, Espacio La Cabina. His next show is planned for fall 2026, Galeria Fudo, Madrid. https://sergiofrutos.com
Ewa Majewska – feminist theorist of culture. In the experimental book Coronafuga. Fragments of Online Dating Discourse from Pandemic Times (Distanz Verlag, Ludwig Forum Aachen and Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2021), she investigated the discourse of online intimacy, following the principles earlier established by the Oulipo group in the 1960. She examines the archives of the surveilling police action targeting gay men in the 1980s Poland. She published several books, incl. Feminist Antifascism (Verso, 2021), as well as numerous articles and essays in journals, magazines and collected volumes: e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies and others. https://ewa-majewska.com
