Dates: Fri./Sat. Aug. 8th & 9th (7:30pm ET)
To reserve your place. Please make a $20 donation that will go towards the artist or RSVP to emily@studioicai.org and bring cash the day of the event.
Image:poster for Performance at Birdsong Community Garden Gallery. Design: PEACH Wien. Illustration: Léon Timo Meier.
Photography: Anastasia Nefedova. Masks: Margret Wibmer © 2025. Studio Margret Wibmer c/o Pictoright Amsterdam, designers and photographer.
Salon d’Amour invites participants to experience a simultaneity of spaces and narratives through voiced readings and intimate listening. Participants don unique masks created by the artist, which serve as conduits to other worlds. Love letters from writers & artists: James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, John Cage, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Marianna Maruyama, Ingeborg Bachmann, Banana Yoshimoto and others will be read aloud. Rooted in Wibmer’s ongoing research into socially engaged art, ecology, and transcultural identity, Salon d’Amour asks: how can humans and non-humans navigate shared realms of reciprocity, cooperation, and collaboration?
Recently presented at The Merchant House in Amsterdam, this new edition—staged as a filmic set created especially for Birdsong in collaboration with ICAI — invites participants into a space of intimacy, anonymity, and exchange. Through collective engagement, participation, and a soundscape developed with composer Robert Poss, Salon d’Amour becomes a poetic ritual—reclaiming a pause in time and evoking a sensual, layered experience of love’s vulnerability, connection, intimacy, distance, abjection, and beauty.
Set within a carefully orchestrated space, participants are guided through an intimate journey— a world of beauty, ambiguity and imagination. As readers read from the manuscript to their masked counterparts, their voices , carried by Poss’s evocative soundscape, flow like a river through various historical times, shifting geographies, and ephemeral encounters, engaging a multitude of perspectives, cultures and worlds.
You can find more info about Salon d’Amour on the project page
And in the recent video document of Salon d’Amour at The Merchant House Amsterdam, Netherlands. (July 4th and 5th 2025) by Anastasia Nefedova
Special thanks to Robert Poss for his evocative soundscape; Marianna Maruyama and Mohamedou Ould Slahi for their contributions to the manuscript.
Partners & Sponsors: Birdsong Community Farm, Hamden; Bermant Foundation, Los Angeles; Origins Nursery & Café, Cooperstown; PEACH Wien; Roxbury Arts Group, Roxbury; Synder’s Greenhouse, Delhi; Tri-County Glass, Oneonta.
