Be What You Want
BE WHAT YOU WANT BUT STAY WHERE YOU ARE:
NOTES ON LEARNING HOW TO LIVE
BOGDAN CHETA
AVAILABLE AT STRIDE AND UNTITLED ART SOCIETY
DESCRIPTION
April 5th, 2014
My eyes closed. I could not open them. All I could see was a grey pulsation. Silently, I walked the now-memorized path to the food court bathroom where local men lovingly congregate in the intimacy of their shared touch. I wanted to be healed with their hands. I asked the first man I touched for help. He took me to his place, where he read me a book before I shared his bed. Suddenly, and out of nowhere, he asked: “can I die with you?”
Emphasizing the notion of inner loneliness as impulse for the construction and reinvention of the public space as a dream world for subjective experimentation and fantasy,
Notes on learning how to livemetaphorically addresses the act & space of writing as a point of contact between two events: when someone, through walking, attempts to imagine themselves as the perfect companion for a stranger, and then what happens when that stranger touches back.
Blending narrative, interviews, distant surveillance, photographs and clinical dialogue with Bogdan’s unguarded honesty, Notes on learning how to live is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.
The first note in the be what you want but stay where you arecompendium was published in Out Proud: Stories of Pride, Courage, and Social Justice, a cross-Canada anthology launched this week, at WorldPride ’14 in Toronto. Out Proud can be purchased online.
ELEPHANT Artist Relief has generously commissioned Bogdan for the delivery of the second note. There are 50 free copies available at Stride and Untitled Art Society. Additional notes will be shared through Bogdan’s upcoming residency at Stride, as part of the 2014 Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival.
