The School of Love & Craft is an artistic research project developed at the request of the Flemish Government delegation in Mozambique. The project addresses sexual and reproductive health not as a field of instruction or behavioural intervention, but as a complex, lived and relational terrain that can be explored through artistic forms of inquiry. While sexual and reproductive health is widely addressed through policy, education, and service provision, many approaches remain grounded in normative frameworks that privilege clarity, outcomes, and predefined values. This project departs from such models by situating art as a mode of research capable of engaging uncertainty, multiplicity, and affect.

The central objective of the School of Love & Craft is to create conditions in which dominant discourses on love, sexuality, and reproduction, whether traditional, biomedical, or Western, can be made perceptible and momentarily unsettled. Rather than aiming to replace these discourses with alternative truths, the project seeks to map points of interruption: moments, spaces, and relations where established narratives falter, overlap, or remain unresolved. Artistic practice is employed here as a method of attention, allowing what is usually silenced, fragmented, or contradictory to appear without being immediately stabilised.

Conceptually, the project is grounded in artistic research traditions that understand knowledge as situated, embodied, and emergent. Drawing on the notion of scholè (Masschelein & Simons, 2013), the School of Love & Craft is conceived as a temporary artistic infrastructure that suspends instrumental demands in order to make space for study. Schooling is approached not as a mechanism of socialisation or qualification, but as an act of world-disclosure: an invitation to encounter love, sexual reproduction, and relationships anew. This orientation is further informed by the work of Michel Serres. From Serres’ perspective, dominant discourses are understood as porous systems continuously disrupted by noise, interference, and translation. The project situates itself deliberately within these zones of interference, treating moments of confusion, contradiction, and misunderstanding not as failures of communication but as productive sites of inquiry.

Love operates within the project both as its thematic focus and as its organising principle. It is not approached as a fixed concept or moral category, but as an orientation characterised by attentiveness, vulnerability, and commitment. 

The School of Love & Craft adopts a methodology rooted in artistic research, grounded in relationality, situatedness, and openness. Rather than relying on predefined variables or measurable indicators, the project employs artistic practices as research methods capable of engaging with complex, embodied, and often ambiguous experiences related to love, sexuality, and reproduction. Knowledge is understood as emergent and processual, arising through encounters rather than being extracted or verified. The first research intervention consists of conversations and semi-structured interviews with actors within a neighbourhood in Maputo. The material generated through these encounters is translated into a symbolic, layered collage that brings multiple voices and narratives into relation while preserving their heterogeneity. In a subsequent phase, this artistic material informs the exploration of lover’s discourses in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes (1977): fragmentary, affective, and non-linear forms of expression that resist totalising explanation. Through this artistic research framework, the School of Love & Craft contributes to alternative ways of engaging sexual and reproductive health as ways that privilege experience, relation, and imagination over prescription.

The School of Love & Craft does not aim to produce conclusive findings in the conventional sense, but to generate situated outcomes that remain open, relational, and generative. As an artistic research project, its primary outcome lies in the creation of new conditions for thinking, sensing, and speaking about love, sexuality, and reproductive relations beyond normative and instrumental frameworks. A first outcome of the project is the emergence of an artistic body of work, most notably the composed collage, that brings together multiple voices, narratives, and experiences from the neighbourhood context in Maputo. This work functions as both a research outcome and a mediating object, making visible the plurality, tensions, and interruptions present within dominant discourses on sexual and reproductive health. Rather than resolving these tensions, the collage sustains them, allowing ambiguity and difference to remain perceptible. A second outcome concerns the development of alternative discursive forms. Through experimentation inspired by Barthes’ concept of lover’s discourses, the project contributes fragmentary, affective, and non-linear modes of articulation that resist explanatory closure. These discursive forms offer a language that is not oriented toward instruction or correction, but toward attentiveness, resonance, and relational understanding. At a methodological level, the project demonstrates the capacity of artistic research to engage sexual and reproductive health as a field of inquiry without reducing it to behavioural change or knowledge transfer. The School of Love & Craft proposes an alternative pedagogical imaginary in which education is approached as an act of world-disclosure, grounded in scholè, care, and shared study.

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