Here, the opening speech of a lecture series programmed and delivered in opening months of 2024 in the School of Design at University of Greenwich, inspired by Annie Lennox’s 1995 song, where I first hit upon a term for a sensibility I was searching for and trying to capture in my research and practice: Neon Romanticism.

No More I Love You’s: Design, Media, Landscape and Architecture at the End of the World

Good evening everyone. And welcome to the No More I Love You’s lecture series.

First, a curatorial statement:

Our post-covid worlds are saturated with political disenchantment, often accompanied by a weariness and an exhaustion at it all.

And to little surprise; the world is on fire, with climate catastrophes, crippling financial crises, crumbling infrastructure, war after war and war, and mass migrations. There is a sense of language leaving us, of changes shifting outside of the words.

In this lecture series from the School of Design at University of Greenwich, we explore the possibilities of wonder in an era of political disenchantment, and of the potentialities of design, media, landscape and architecture to re-orientate us, to re-engage us and to help us re-marvel at our worlds, so that maybe — just maybe — we can once again say I love you.

Reflecting on this curatorial statement I wrote at the end of last year, I was struck by some further ideas and implications about what we have done in programming this lecture series.

The first reflection comes from the lyrics of the song itself and it is this: it is the idea that being out of love — that falling out of love with the world, our communities, our friends, our families, our lovers, ourselves — robs us of our language and places us in the terrifying territory of being unable to articulate ourselves to each other. An out-of-loveness robs us of our ability to speak. 

And this reflection, this proposition, reminded me of Audre Lorde’s essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, where she writes:

“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

“But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.””

So through offering a space to listen and talk with a variety of people across design, media, landscape and architecture, we hope we are making some small contribution to stopping it all — everything  — rising up and repeatedly punching us in the mouth from the inside.

The second reflection is this: in programming this series and looking at who has been invited to join and speak with us, I am conscious of attempting to articulate something that seems to sit in the ether at the moment, a sense of a resurgence of romanticism, as most recently described by the writer and journalist Ross Barkan, when he traced this zeitgeist shift as “Empiricism, algorithms and smartphones are out – astrology, art and a life lived fiercely offline are in.” 

Whilst this analysis is not quite right, there is a sense of what I am calling Neon Romanticism, a fluorescent rebellion against our determined,  despairing and algorithmic futures.

Hopefully, we can, through this term, be together and hold space for one another to move into a more hopeful and loving place.

“The night was dark and love was a burning fence around my house.”
Audre Lorde