Alex Cecchetti

Alex Cecchetti (Italy 1977)

Performance Volden 16, the back yard, Friday 4. October 18.00–20.00
Posters in inner-city Aarhus

Love Bar

Italian artist Alex Cecchetti describes his Love Bar as a ‘feral wild state’ akin to an undomesticated plant unfurling freely and lushly in the wild. Love Bar is a kind of proto-theatre – a precursor of the theatre we know today where music, performance and storytelling come together. Here, audiences and performers fuse to form a single totality. Love Bar has been staged at art events in several European metropolitan cities, from the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to the Volcano Extravaganza on Stromboli, and in Aarhus the artist has orchestrated the piece for a hidden city garden. Enter through a small wrought-iron gate facing Volden, pass through one of the city’s narrowest alleys to arrive at a secret, almost paradisiacal place behind the storefronts.

In Love Bar, the guests come to the host to speak about their own love lives. Based on their stories, the artist creates Love Potions which can create the balance or passion the guests yearn for. Herbs and plants have been collected beforehand in the countryside around Aarhus, brewed up to create syrups and mixtures. Alongside the dried flowers and the flora of the garden they form an ‘alchemist’s living laboratory of love’. In the weeks that follow, the performance will spread its hedonistic message further out around the city by means of a poster campaign in which the flowers and herbs from Love Elixir and other potions emerge on advertising pillars and façades.

Read more about the exhibition and the other works here:

Alex Cecchetti: Love Bar fra You Are in My Veins ved Snevringen, Mejlgade, kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.
Alex Cecchetti: Love Bar fra You Are in My Veins ved Volden 16, Mejlgade, kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.
Alex Cecchetti: Love Bar fra You Are in My Veins ved Volden 16, Mejlgade, kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.