Love Line | Mimi Allin
"Artist A K Mimi Allin is looping L—O—V—E in cursive letters across Greensboro, blazing a new footpath with an old rotary telephone, collecting voices from people on the street and from visitors to Elsewhere Museum, short messages of love, encouragement and friendship. Her old dial phone is rigged to play these messages back through the receiver. As the LOVE LINE loops over class and race lines, it seeks to dissolve the divisions decades of privilege have imprinted on our cities. The artist is passing messages of love from resident to resident, neighborhood to neighborhood. Given our current political crisis LOVE has become yet again a radical form of resistance against dominant culture. LOVE LINE is an attempt to embed a new space dedicated to the enactment of LOVE, a Thirdspace carved into a built environment, a heterotopia between the everyday and the other spaces of LOVE. The artist seeks to make this space visible by inviting citizens from every district to contribute to the re-coding of space by expressing and listening for LOVE. If LOVE, as a cultural expression and tool for community building, is excluded from the landscape, we must dedicate ourselves to creating space for it.
In the evenings, I have been working privately with the Elsewhere collection, making performance videos, dancing with the artworks, wearing vintage costumes. I am delighted to present to you my work on the LOVE LINE and screen my videos for the first time here tonight. Tomorrow I invite you to walk the ""O"" in LOVE with me. Meet at Elsewhere at noon on Saturday 7 March. Join in a dialog about about what LOVE looks like in our geography. This event will last 1-1/2 hours. Layer for warmth."
