The provocation ‘What if I could make you love me?’ is simultaneously terrifying and seductive. But the love spell also holds potential as an affirmation of our desires and as a way of expressing that we are deserving of love. It can also be a trigger for us to access a space that sits outside of reality, to manipulate our senses and overdose on our own emotions.

Pills & Potions will offer a setting to experiment with methods of love magic, with distinct rituals lead by Lea Collet & Marios Stamasis, Stella Sideli, and Brenda Guesnet. Encountering layered incantations, pungent incense, brainwave music, and blinding lights, we might become aware of the magical substances that surround and enter us, challenging our self-possession as subjects.

There will be an alcoholic love potion and baked offerings.

This event is part of ‘Better Together’, a collective events programme at Enclave Lab in Deptford, London, initiated by a group of current Goldsmiths MFA Curating students.

LEA COLLET & MARIOS STAMATIS are a duo of love. Their collaboration evolves through a range of media such as video, performance, text, and sculpture. They like to use theatre as a method in which they stage the implications of publicly performed affect and embodiment within an emotional capitalism framework. Recent work includes We are having a great time at Rockelmann & (Berlin, DE); Key Performance Interludes at Green Ray (London, UK); USE/USER/USED at Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK); I Think I’m Experiencing Pure Bliss at Entreprise Project (Athens, GR), 2016; Faith Dollars, Taxfree Imagination & Uptown Bliss and Chorus for Three at Assembly Point (London, UK); Ambiguity Symposium at The Showroom (London, UK), 2015; BYOB Geneva, Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland), 2014.

STELLA SIDELI is a researcher, curator and producer based in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths, dept. Cultural Studies, in 2015, while curating exhibitions at Tenderpixel in London. Her research focuses on the shapeshifting meaning of materiality in the current ultra-connected condition, with attention to images and sound. Last curated projects included Feeling In The Eyes, with Nina Beier, David Ferrando Giraut, Will Kendrick, Seth Price, Rustan Söderling at Tenderpixel, London; The Role of Unintended Consequences, with Eva Fàbregas, Joey Holder, Laure Prouvost, at Syndicate, Cologne DE (both 2016); Tropical Hangover, co-curated with Borbála Soós, with Salvatore Arancio, Zuzanna Czebatul, Rowena Harris, Laure Prouvost, Suzanne Treister at Tenderpixel, 2017.

BRENDA GUESNET is a curator based in London. She is currently completing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths while developing and realising independent curatorial projects with her collective ANGL. Her interests revolve around the intersections of history, magic, and the marginal. Recent projects include Cybernetic Resistance, with Paul Maheke, Kiona Hagen Niehaus, and Erica Scourti, at The Showroom, London (2016); A Place For You To Dream with Max Colson, Katy Connor, Felicity Hammond and Laura Yuile at the Gallery at Republic, London (2017); and a podcast called snakesoup where she interviews artists about their obsessions (snakesouppodcast.tumblr.com).