Elsa Artmann/SANFTE ARBEIT

For Freelance Lover, every date is a work meeting.

With “Langes Wochenende” (Long Weekend), we dedicate ourselves to our professional and personal relationships. We are interested in how we romanticize our work and the relationships within it—especially within precarious conditions—and how we adapt our personal relationships to the logics of work, precisely where those boundaries begin to blur.

We want to speak about collegial tenderness as a utopia of relation—its beauty, its promise, its fragility, and its failure. Drawing inspiration from the intimacy techniques of lap dance, we explore the physicalities of professionalized closeness and its intrusions into the private.

Through new arrangements of lovesongs, we make audible the romantic promises that remain unfulfilled in our love affair with work. We do not fundamentally problematize the blurriness between spheres of life, but describe it as a lived reality from which many things can emerge: the professional intimacy between audience and performer, as well as within the ensemble, carries both the risk of mutual exploitation and a utopian potential.

What if we were to understand and nurture all working relationships as love relationships—ones that must be protected from exploitation?