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For the epigraph of his 1974 book Libidinal Economy, the French philosopher Jean François Lyotard adopted a slightly reworked version of a sentence originally appearing in Stendhal’s 1822 De l'Amour, specifically in a chapter entitled Des Courts. Inscribing his “livre méchant” in the conviction that “[w]ho knows not how to hide knows not how to love,” Lyotard acknowledges the concealment natural to intimacy as a crucial and generative force underlying the non-plus-ultra of relations. Somewhat similarly yet with drastically divergent consequences, Stendhal looked at the Provençal tradition of courtly love poetry and conception of “amor de lonh” (distant love) for an exemplary form for his own theory of crystallization: the process by which lovers work in privy absence, idealizing their beloved through imagination and psychosomatic projection, and eventually establishing perfect objects of desire (and sustainment). The Joys emerges from this complex libidinal genealogy as an attempt to expose intimacy’s double role: generation and reification. It does so by offering semantic and material, markedly sensorial field where trembling and institutioning converge. 

The exhibition unfolds across a series of semantic and material layerings. Center stage is taken by a double series of prints installed across the corner joining the two main walls of the exhibition space. One set of prints is of still frames extracted from footage of a couple deep kissing punctuated by moments of lip biting. After filming and selecting the stills, Ciarrocca inverted them and had them printed through a black-and-white-only HP LaserJet located in the Berlin corporate headquarters of a major German bank, which he was able to access through a personal connection. He then proceeded to transfer the grayscale prints onto industrial sanding paper, the bank's toner forming the blurred contours of the lovers' faces and mouths against the grey abrasive surface.
The installed sequence opens on the left with an initial bite, followed by a surrender into a deep kiss that unfolds through multiple frames, before concluding with a reciprocal bite where the roles reverse. As the kiss deepens toward the moment when the two profiles would become virtually indistinguishable, the negative space of the room’s interior corner suddenly occupies and replaces this central frame—a gesture of removal subtly hinting at the way deep intimacy is, at once, the place of dissolution and of structural foundation to discursive realities such as identity and property.

Both intercepting and narrativizing the kissing stills is a second set of prints, composed of short sentences crossed over what looks like a sunset sky, darkening as the series progresses across the corner. The horizontal sentences are transcripts from the artist’s own diary pages, originally noted with personal thoughts and altered excerpts from Hélène Cixous's Tomb(e). The diary entries are crossed over with vertical, categorizing statements printed on vellum sheets and composed by the artist by repurposing CATIA, the global industry standard design software for aerospace and defense, as a text editor. The darkening sky is revealed to be nothing else than the software’s background wireframe.

The rest of the space is pinpointed by material interventions that variously frame the environment of this structural kissing sequence, expanding on how the personal and the institutional overlap in the intimate. Incorporated as both sound and text throughout the exhibition are fragments from St. Augustine's Confessions as well as BAE Systems' corporate communications transposed from collective to singular voice, exposing the uncanny resemblance between declarations of love and assertions of power. The space is scored by a seemingly endless overlay of field recordings, sex tapes, youtube and social media autoplays, music tracks abruptly cut short. Still frames from a rose bush filmed by the artist in his hometown show the coexistence in a single plant of the three stages of flowering: budding, blooming, and decay. A translucent liquid poured all over the gallery floor pools and crystallizes over the course of days, slowly flowing underneath screens that function as framing devices for the liquid’s coagulations as well as for the traces left by the already evaporated water. Including electrolytes, amino acids, lactic acid, urea and other chemicals dissolved in running water, this liquid solution replicates the chemical composition of human sweat, functioning as a phantom of corporeal balance dynamics. Fatigue, pleasure, or exercise. The stress of repression, or the joy of release.

— excerpt from the press text














The Joys
5 July 2025
with Andre Mulzer & Olga Hohmann, Yanne Horas, Vida Vojic, ML, Ugne Uma, Giangiacomo Gallo, Telva 


The Joys
6 July 2025
with Zack Darsee, Cru Encarnação, Hayes Hoey, Matteo Vogliazzo, Liola Mattheis, Beatrice Martini, Vida Vojic