How can hospitality, silence and secrecy be tools for social organising? Legendary multi-media producer, writer and DJ Terre Thaemlitz explores this question during a two-day residency and several performances at Bergen Kunsthall.

On the second night of the residency, Thaemlitz performs a rare live concert – an amalgam of lecture, audio and video – of her album Lovebomb/Ai No Bakudan (2003).

Lovebomb/Ai No Bakudan is an analysis of love as a cultural mechanism which enables otherwise unacceptable acts of violence, as demonstrated by domestic violence, a terrorist’s love for her cause and America’s vengeful love of freedom. Digitally processed spoken word samples narrate various scenarios of global violence – from a posthumous association between the roots of Italian Futurism and the 1906 lynching of three black men in Terre’s home town, to the social abuses and neglect burdened on the last lingering survivors of atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Thaemlitz’s personal post-queer-bashing traumas. Sharp video edits of animation, collage and found footage add new layers of depth and dark humour to the ‘Lovebomb’ audio project.

Photo: Terre Thaemlitz