To Carry This Love’s Weight With Me Is Heavy
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The project “To Carry This Love’s Weight With Me Is Heavy” explored how people attracted to men experience romantic love in the patriarchal regime, and how “feminist friendship” counterforces such relationships and encourages political change. My enquiry was influenced by feminist theorists as Silvia Federici and her essay “On the Meaning of Gossip”, Lauren Fournier and her research on autotheory as a feminist practice, and bell hooks’ thinking on love and masculinity.
My research-based project includes an artist book, a multisensory bar installation, and textiles. For the book “How You Did Not Expect Romance To Be” I gathered 25 patriarchal “Love Stories” by posting an open call on my personal Instagram account in January 2025, asking people attracted to men to share their experiences. In my exploration of “feminist friendship” I activated “A Place for Friends to Chill: A Feminist Kafenio”, a café-bar installation which people were encouraged to visit along with their friends and enjoy their company, while having a “girl dinner” and a drink that I would prepare for them in the bar. The installation aimed to symbolically reclaim female friendship, departing from the example of the traditional Greek Kafenio, a café/tavern. Kafenio used to be, and in some cases still is, a male-dominated space, where men would go after work to meet other men from their community and spend time with them, while women would be at home taking care of the housework and children. Women would only meet their friends while shopping for food or by visiting each other at home for a coffee, and it would be considered inappropriate for them to go to the Kafenio without the company of either their husbands or other male members of their family. In the textile artworks of this project, I explored narratives of female/queer friendship and the confessions that often made between friends, by reflecting on my relationships with my friends and the endless discussions we share, talking about dating, relationships and sex with men, and the struggles of them under patriarchy.
