INTIMATE REVOLUTIONS
Sensual Audio as Shapeshifting research into Identity, Belonging and Imagining
2-year artistic research by Davis Freeman & Elke Van Campenhout
The Project
Intimate revolutions is a 2 year research journey into the imaginative and revolutionary powers of audio erotics. Since our protests are no longer heard when shouted out, we redirect the center of subversivity to the inner imaginings of the body, to our desires and our mental capacities for deeply-felt change. Audio sessions can be short, high-intensity, or can develop into lengthy tailor-made ritual sessions. Every session helps the person listening to explore desires that transform their proprioception of their bodies, personal space and their understanding of connection to the other.
In the development of the audio sessions, we want to work with divergent groups, with different backgrounds, orientations, and senses of self. Including people with disabilities, isolated youngsters and the elderly. The work is not only about creating soundtracks, partly in collaboration with different focus groups, but also to learn from this exchange and feedback on the tapes. How do we construct our desire? Is desire identity-based? Can we desire what we are not? Can desire our sense of self, and include otherness, even non-human orientations?
The tracks are an invitation to explore identity, well-being, connection and a sensual reshaping or who we are and what place we take in the world.
The recordings will explore non-normative desires as well as memory-driven intimacy, offering experiences some may wish to access privately, without live enactment.
Why It Matters
- Artistic: Expands performance into immersive sound and digital media. Allows the performance to play out in our own bodies, in our intimate spaces, transforming them in the process.
- Social: Creates inclusive, ethical, and therapeutic tools for self-exploration. Since we always start with a lot of blind spots in these researches, we emphasize the need for dialogue, exchanges and live focus groups to allow for a change of focus and approach.
- Preventative: Offers safe outlets for frustration, especially for those isolated or lacking access to healthy intimacy.
- Innovative: Blends art, sound design, and therapeutic practice to reframe intimacy as a political and personal act.
How You Can Collaborate
We are looking for theatres, cultural centers, and festivals to:
- Host peer-group workshops where participants listen, respond, and shape the recordings.
- Facilitate interviews with local communities on memory, desire, and intimacy.
- Support try-outs of prototype recordings in safe, small-group settings.
- Provide space for informal public sharings of research (no staged performance).
Outputs & Sharing
- Open-access online archive with sample recordings, ethical guidelines, and research insights.
- Public research sharing in conversational formats.
- Documentation for both artistic and therapeutic communities.
Artist: Davis Freeman is known for socially engaged, provocative works with Random Scream, Davis has spent over two decades creating performances that blend documentary truth, humor, and political urgency. Internal Intimacy continues this trajectory, moving activism from the public sphere to the internal landscapes of desire.
Elke Van Campenhout is an experienced Tantrika. In a previous life Elke was an art critic, artistic researcher and dramaturg, before she decided to devote her life completely to her spiritual practice. 4 years ago she started up The Monastery : an experimental living and practice community, open to all colours of spiritual and artistic work. With The Monastery Elke explores ritual work in unexpected places. As a Tantrik she studied with different teachers and at the Rasayana Tantra University, and found an inspiring and powerful teacher in shaman-tantrik Anand Rudra, who is a regular guest at Studio La Limite. She develops a line of deeply experienced practices that focus mostly on creating a mystical relation to what lies beyond our limits of (self-)understanding and expansion.