With love not for love

With love not for love is a flamboyant and performative act of protest that gathers care workers and their allies in the streets of Molenbeek. 

This cheerful moment is part of a longer trajectory that Brussels-based artist Anna Rispoli is co-facilitating together with local and international collectives of migrant women with and without papers and their sisterhood organisations. In the frame of this research, they share with each other political tools, artistic methodologies, mutual support and feminist joy in activism. This iteration focuses on the ambiguous relationship between care work and the emotional expectations it generates. It thus raises the question: Who takes care of those who take care of our society? 

Whether in their families, or those of their employers, whether paid or unpaid, women are required to provide care labour for the elderly, children and the house. And this labour is often called "love". For migrant women, this caring bond is also the required condition to acquire legal residence, to the point where it becomes a threatening ambiguity. 

The aim of this empowering gathering is to reclaim the terrain of love as a ground for nurturing oneself, sisterhood and political debate, thus creating a way to converge into a powerful collective body and joyfully engage in the struggle for regularisation and a more just society for everybody. 

With love not for love, which is chaotically unfolding on the bridge at Porte de Flandre on the occasion of Molenfest, is a first blueprint for a potential bigger event that will emerge from this 2-year trajectory.

• Anna Rispoli works between artistic creation and civic space, developing prototypes for sharing material resources, intelligence and affect. For twenty years her transdisciplinary projects, performances, and urban installations have been created in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. 

In recent years, she has been working on various forms of "recreated documentary" such as Your word in my mouth about intimacy, eroticism and politics, Close Encounters (Nestroy Award nomination) in collaboration with teenagers about the social pressures they face, and A Certain Value (European network InSitu), confronting the assembly practices of four different communities.