3 materialising impalpable, volatile states elisa tosoni

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Materialising impalpable, volatile states I have often wished for an almost absolute silence, and have been longing for moments of genuinely idle suspension. A certain stereotypical vision associates idleness to Southern Europe, or Southern latitudes in general, and yet I wonder if I have found at least some frames of that idyllic time here, at the foot of a glacier in the Western portion of the Italian Alps, where I retreated for the summer. This is somehow another kind of South, with the same flora and colours of a sunny day in the subpolar region: it’s the Italian Alps, but it could well be Lofoten, off the Norwegian coast. Another style of living, practiced between the wooden walls of a hut and high paths inundated of breathtaking skylines. Such altitudes entail a chain of physical reactions; and where water slowly reaches its lower boiling point, everyone’s oneiric life appears to have suddenly revived. Left with no memory of the dimension one spent the night wrapped within, we are told we mumbled and screamed in our sleep. Trying to make sense of this new eventful dreamlife, I recalled a Swedish friend who used to warn me how heavy cheeses induce weird dreams. Yet, I told myself the solution to this hurdle must lay somewhere quite far from the not-so-mysterious world of fontina. Dreaming at 2500 meters: what is the difference between dreaming at low or high altitudes, or at different latitudes? Do images, storylines change? I end up wondering about the effect the place where one sleeps might have on dreams, and consequently, on the images imbuing people’s wake lives. I wonder if someone else ever dreamed the same dream as I did, or at least the same plot, the only thing I am sure about, is that many others must be asking themselves the same questions. My imagery encompasses historical revolutions in remote African countries, natural disasters, murder scenes, surreal animals ... and these complex, HD night time narratives often packed with special effects and multiple languages keep me occupied in attempted interpretations, sometimes I even looked for the corresponding numbers in the Neapolitan Cabala, and played the lottery (of course, never winning a penny). Yet, as a rationalist I have always professed not to believe in dreams: it is just like horoscopes, you read them while sipping your morning espresso out of some kind of innate habit and discuss them with friends, often making fun of one another. Is it perhaps my curiosity – as it happens to the majority of people - that keeps feeding off this threshold between total disbelief and extreme fascination? Why not donate my dreams to some serious study, to reconcile these two sides of the self? When Eva Frapiccini’s Dreams’ Time Capsule project came about, there was the answer to both my participatory, guinea-pig instincts as an individual, and my curatorial interest for complex, heavily processbased artistic research endeavours. Over one year ago, while discussing with the artist a handful of hypotheses for a new project’s concept, she spoke of a promising idea: a time capsule bringing together dreams from different parts of the planet to then attempt to understand their archetypes and variation in time through a complex comparative study, as an artistic experiment, at the distance of one generation. Originally thought as a dedicated installation space within Eva’s solo show at her gallery in Turin (Galleria Alberto Peola, September 2011) which I was called to curate, the project collapsed on itself many times as the remainder of the exhibition was being discussed over and over again. The scenario of a somehow sinister fairytale, where day and night met at the gallery to generate a feeling of suspension between worlds, states of mind, and cultural archetypes became embodied by the almost mystical fictional figure of the scientist Aleksander Prus Caneira and his research on portals between worlds opened through special lockets during dream states. Her solo show Museo Caneira | la fisica del possibile was eventually dedicated to Caneira. In November 2011, towards the closure of that same exhibition, a dreadfully rainy weekend saw a monumental inflatable structure spring up in one of the piazzas of Turin: Dreams’ Time Capsule was first shown as an “offsite research commission” in its prototypical form, and it collected around one hundred dreams. Eventually created as an autonomous tangent, yet laying at the very kernel of everything. A complex and lengthy research process had started to take shape, only the first participatory step of which becoming visible: a travelling intervention in the public sphere accompanied by the creation of an audio archive. The physical materialisation of impalpable, volatile states had begun. The following step was to come up with a new original design for the structure, taking into account the public’s feedback collected with the Turinese test version. Eva worked closely with Italian designer Michele Tavano, and a team of artisans, developing a white inflatable structure reminiscent of a seashell; I found in Magnus Ericson, curator at Arkitekturmuseet, the ideal interlocutor to take the project forward in terms of co-production and exhibition opportunities in Sweden and beyond. Now, with the support from Arkitekturmuseet, Joanna Sandell and Botkyrka Konsthall, the Young Italian Artists board (GAI) and the Italian Cultural Institute “C.M. Lerici”, it has been possible to realise Dreams’ Time Capsule and assist Eva in her extremely ambitious research to trace the evolution of dream states of a largely international cross-section of society.


The journey of the permanent structure of Dreams’ Time Capsule started during the summer of 2012, in Egypt, kindly hosted by The Townhouse Gallery, where the artist was in residence until the beginning of July. With great public participation, especially considering the event coincided with the hot days of the elections in Cairo, the archive collected a further one hundred testimonies from a wide audience, including many groups of women and young people who are not habitual gallery-goers. It will be incredibly interesting to unravel their imageries of dreams, and put together a synthesis of the Cairo’s collective unconscious during such tumultuous political times in Egypt; an original attempt to understand recent and contemporary history through the lens of those unconscious thoughts that clearly (in)form our (political) actions. th

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Dreams’ Time Capsule is now preparing to appear in the Stockholm area, at Arkitekturmuseet (20 & 21 of nd rd September 2012), and as part of Fittja Open in collaboration with Botkyrka Konsthall (22 & 23 of September 2012). Arriving in the artist’s own luggage, the audio-recording station will gently project the public into an extraordinary spatial dimension, outside the immediate green surroundings, stepping into an intimate dimension: the perfect atmosphere for the visitors’ individual recording of one or more dreams they would like to donate to the sound archive. Collecting oneiric testimonies for a couple of years, until a substantial number of dreams will be reached, then sealed by the artist as a time capsule and reopened only after a decade to be analysed by her together with a team of researchers, the archive will generate a network of donors who will be kept informed of the various stages of the project (from other collection events worldwide, to the various phases of the study). A highly performative and process-based project in its nature, as (tense: future perfect continuous), Dreams’ Time Capsule is a key component and kernel of development of my long term curatorial program Tense, which aims to serve as a tool for a taxonomy of temporality, by bringing forward through the work of mainly mid-career and emerging artists a peculiar sensibility of time, recuperating nuances of thinking about and expressing time that are endangered or have disappeared, creating a possible vocabulary for an extended sensibility of time. Like a time traveller, Eva Frapiccini not only moves easily between media, but also between tenses. By conjugating imagination, memory and anticipation into her works, she instigates the emergence of a rich(er) spectrum of temporalities and experiences of time, as well as offering critical tools to re-think and re-imagine histories. Being able to express richer presents and pasts, and to imagine extended futures, seems to have become a necessary counteraction to these times of continuous international crises. Dreams’ Time Capsule, inhabiting a future perfect continuous, pushes us to remember and to imagine an open-ended future at the same time. Perhaps we all need to take a few minutes to sit down and think through our dreams, sharing them with others to preserve a different history which would normally pass totally unnoticed. After all, we sleep and dream a third of our lives, and those images stay with us in our wake lives, they influence our actions, our potential as human beings, and History. Elisa Tosoni


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