clemente ciarrocca

selected work

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THE JOYS

Aktionshaus, Berlin

24 June - 25 July 2025

preview
press release, floorplan and checklist
walkthrough
Crisis of Representation - companion text to The Joys
Precarity & Grace Audio Service - exhibition soundscape
A Divagation - Gabriela Acha on The Joys

Photos by Max Eulitz and Marc Gemini


For the epigraph of his 1974 book Libidinal Economy, 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 acknowledged concealment as a crucial and generative force underlying the non-plus-ultra of relations. Somewhat similarly yet with drastically divergent consequences, what Stendhal had found in the Provençal tradition of courtly love poetry and conception of “amor de lonh” (distant love) was an exemplary form for his own theory of ‘crystallization:’ the process by which lovers work in 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 establishment. It does so by folding and unfolding as a vibrating, semantic and material field where intimate interaction and institutioning converge. 

— excerpt from the exhibition preview by Aktionshaus