L is for the Way You Look at Me II

Departing from its first edition, which looked at love and intimacy through the invisible entanglement of microbial interactions, the 2026 edition continues to explore love by bringing the senses and sensibilities to the corporeal—larger bodies woven by microorganisms. This emphasis on the corporeal as porous, transformative, and multispecies put forward an understanding of the self as a complex landscape, interwoven with other bodies, feelings, stories, and beats.

From single-cell organisms to the multicellular body, the programme traces life not simply in terms of evolutionary linearity but also how it has developed through the radical merging of living matter, bound in a process of transformation. According to the symbiogenesis theory, the origin of complex life on Earth dates back to the late Precambrian time, when a nucleus-less ‘prokaryotic’ cell—driven by biological impulses—engulfed a smaller bacterium. Due to indigestion, the two organisms began to cohabitate, eventually forming the hybrid, nucleated ‘eukaryotic’ cell that serves as the basic cellular unit of all animals, plants, fungi, and protists.

[1] This merger process, which took place roughly 3 billion years ago, continues to this day, providing cellular foundation to almost all known living organisms: plant cells integrate photosynthetic bacteria to eat and breathe, corals host photosynthetic algae to harvest energy, and our guts house a multitude of bacteria for digestion. This membrane-rupturing, part-sex,[2] part-digestion, part-sheltering interpermeation process that takes place among living organisms at the cellular level lays the foundation of life, which is always forming and reforming, with fluid bodily boundaries.

A similar fusion took place some 4.5 billion years ago: an intense collision between the planet Theia and Earth caused the latter’s mantle to open, subsequently engulfing a large part of Theia into Earth’s core. The debris from both planets eventually gathered into the Earth-orbiting moon. This 2022 scientific theory[3] of the Moon’s formation tells a story of life not unlike the symbiogenesis of cells: the boundary-crossing interactions among different forms as the starting point of life’s transformation and evolution. The Earth-Moon system[4] sets planetary forces in motion—generating long-period tides and shaping Earth’s environments where these pushes and pulls create the conditions for cellular collisions and hybridization to unfold. Since then, single cells have begun to emerge and encounter, meld and expel, eat and be eaten, thrive and die, be and become. Over eons, they have polymerized into different living organisms, including humans.

Bodies—both human and non-human, microbial and planetary—are interwoven in a set of codependent relations. They simultaneously host and participate in a series of skin-tearing, gene-exchanging, and shape-shifting activities to metabolize, survive, reproduce, and evolve. This shared cellular-level kinship among different bodies spins threads of correlation among different kingdoms of life, just like the interplanetary tidal waves that connect lives on Earth through oceanic rhythms, lunar cycles, heartbeats, breathing, and bleeding. Echoing this network of relations, L is for the Way You Look at Me II considers the corporeal as an ecological site, connecting to and vibrating within the meshwork of life. With female, queer, wounded, and healing bodies, the programme moves between food cultures and medicinal practices, astrology and agriculture, music, and poetry to explore the ways in which bodies attune to and make sense of the world.

Taking place respectively in summer, autumn, and winter this year, and contemplating thematics including the more-than-human, medicinal cosmologies, interiority and darkness, the programme invites the audience to experience the body through different temperatures, temporalities, heart beats, and melodies. It highlights bodies as the multisensorial entry through which we undertake the self-expanding journey of life and experience the unnameable corporeal yearnings to feel, touch, and synchronize with other rhythms and beats—an impulse of life that we, sometimes, call love.

[1] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 113–144.

[2] Biologist Lynn Margulis describes symbiogenesis, or endosymbiosis, a process in which organic beings merge, as ‘a long-lasting sexual encounter except that the participants are members of different species’, see Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Life? (Bekeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 120.

[3] J. A. Kegerreis, S. Ruiz-Bonilla, V. R. Eke, R. J. Massey, T. D. Sandnes, and L. F. A. Teodoro, ‘Immediate Origin of the Moon as a Post-impact Satellite’, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 937/2 (2022).

[4] C.R. Bern, ‘The Moon and the Origin of Life’, Earth-Moon Relationships (Springer Science+Business Media New York, 2001), 61–66.

With:

Nina Lykke, Edoardo Micheli, Jennifer de Negri, Umico Niwa, and xindi