SaraBrown

Take a seat and start asking the right questions.

What you need is meaningful questions, not reassuring answers or pills for your pain.

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If you ask yourself what freedom is for you, what would be the answer?

Would you call yourself free if what you do is permitted by law? If your lifestyle is socially acceptable?...

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By releasing tensions in your body you'll release tensions in your thinking. Embrace and respect the fluidity of your internal movements, and you'll honour the fluidity of your desires, your life path, and your relationships. How to firmly connect with each other through the tide, and how can we enjoy the ride whilst dealing with our fears?

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Our society is dominated by a patriarchal and capitalist system that affects all aspects of our life: our behaviour, our needs, our way of creating relationships; our bodies, and our thinking. We all somehow indulge this crazy habitat called 'society'. We have all at some point felt oppressed by it, we all have felt powerless while losing touch with our real and deep desires.

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PLEASUREisPOWER was born from the desire to explore the connection between sexual freedom and freedom of thought, and between society, power dynamics, and the stigma attached to human sexuality.

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We believe in sexuality as an aspect of our personality that is anything but an accessory. We believe in sexuality as the foundation of our identity, and in its knowledge as a precondition for fully developing our critical ability, our sense of being in the world. We believe that a fruitful intellectual activity is accompanied by the vitality and the free and lively movement of the body, overcoming rigidity and barriers.

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If we ask ourselves what freedom is for us, what would we answer?

Am I free if what I do is permitted by law? Am I free if what I do is socially normalised?

Or, conversely, is freedom something profoundly subjective, deeply connected to our individual feelings, context, history?

 

This project was born by the will to research and explore the connection between sexual freedom and freedom of thought; among social control, power, knowledge and repression of sexuality.

How, releasing the rigidity of my body, can I release the rigidity of my thinking? How, welcoming and respecting the fluidity of my internal movements, do I respect the fluidity of my desires, my limits, my directions, my relationships? How can you and I connect firmly in this tide? How can we respect and love this tide facing the fear it presents to us?

 

Our society is dominated by a patriarchal and capitalist system that impregnates and influences all aspects of everyone's life: material needs, social conduct and within the most intimate relationships ... the bodies, the minds. Individuals — the "social actors" — are made psychologically, emotionally and economically dependent on this domain, eventually limiting themselves -or annihilating- their own deeper, truer instincts and desires.

 

We believe in sexuality as an aspect of our personality that is anything but accessory. We believe in sexuality as the foundation of our identity, in its knowledge as a presupposition for a full and free development of our intellectual activity, our critical capacity, our being in the world. We believe that a fruitful intellectual activity is accompanied by the vitality and the free and lively movement of the body, overcoming rigidity and barriers.

 

Since we were children, we were driven by the curiosity to know our body and the others'. This is because we wanted to experience, through it, our joy in pleasure. Growing up, this curiosity has been contaminated by feelings of guilt and fear of our instincts, imprinted on our bodies by the heavy hand of academic, parental, catholic education, that tried to infuse in our bodies a pattern of normality, making us conceal ourselves under a thick layer of conformism (binary, monosexual and hetero-normative). This is even truer for the feminine, homosexual, transsexual, intersexual universes, urged by society to hide, to be ashamed of their own bodies and sexual choices.

 

Sexuality does not only concern what happens inside the closed walls of a room, it does not only refer to the sexual act, but it invests our individuality in all aspects of life - psychological, physical, social, cultural, in what we consider "private" as well as in the "public". We believe in sexuality as one of the most powerful forces in nature, that moves us and that bathes in any type of experience, individual or relational. At the same time, it's the human dimension that's more subject to social control and inhibitions, to defensive mechanisms and distrust of the majority.

Where does it come from and what is the function of social repression of sex life? And what does sexual freedom mean, then?

 

About sexuality, apparently, we know everything, but its true meaning is missing. There is much talk about sex, but within well-defined limits, rules of morally acceptable discretion and decency, or through that distorted and degrading language of which free porn, accessible to anyone, is the chief spokesman. In any case, knowledge about sex and sexuality is still very confused and far from reality. It hardly goes out of that division between public and private that keeps generating monsters and foment solitude.

We need a new kind of conversation that neither does disqualify or reject sex nor encourage and intensify it to the point of deforming or degrading it. We need to bring sex and sexuality closer to our daily reality, to free them from the blind alley of taboo and to bring them back to human beings. We need to reconcile ourselves with our body, listen to our desires, value our peculiar quest for pleasure, leaving aside what is considered "normal”," "natural”, "healthy”.

 

What is the true function of sex in people's lives? Is it really meant for procreation, reproduction of workforce and family model? How much value do we give to the autonomy and freedom of the identity of bodies - in a word, to our sexual agency? How much is the field of pleasures still obsessively connected to the rule of heterosexual monogamy? Is body pleasure necessarily linked to the sexual instinct? How can a liberation of the bodies help free our minds?

 

Our bodies can tell us endless stories, to the point of moving us to tears. They are the vehicle and the medium through which our past, our memory - personal and collective - is engraved.

We believe in sex as a game, as an act of love, as a way of knowing oneself and the other. Each body is an infinite, complex, unique cosmos. Each body is an unrepeatable story, a painting with an incomparable colour combination.

 

If all of us, in this world, had the courage to love (firstly ourselves), who would want to go to war?

Who wants to work to serve their country after an orgasm?

We become courageous spokesmen of a new way — body-based — of moving forward into the future. It may dip its roots in the past, but without limiting the possibilities of choice and renewal of the new generation in which we are taking part.

We run the risk of being free, of breathing, of bathing ourselves. Of claiming our human right to sentiment and to a personal reaction.

 

We want a revolution of bodies. A revolution to be daily. A sweet, gentle, responsible revolution.

Desiring it, and knowing what makes you feel free, is already freedom.