#asymmetries

THE DREAM OF A TIGER

by blogadmin | Dec 19, 2023 | WISHING MACHINE, #asymmetries, #collectivebody

The following is an assemblage of traces from the social dreaming practice led by Edoardo Mozzanega and Chiara Prodi, artists in residency at Lavanderia a Vapore in September 2023 with the project Dream of a Tiger.

Social dreaming dates back to the 1980s when it was developed as a method of sharing dreams in social environments. Mozzanega and Prodi introduced an expanded version of the practice, inviting the participants to share stories, dreams and rumours in the present tense and first person, and with that, shaping a collective dream matrix of imagining, listening and resting with the theme:

I ONCE KILLED AN ANIMAL

I ONCE FEARED TO BE KILLED BY AN ANIMAL

The following collages are composed of some recurring images from the collective dreaming. They take the contrast between the dreamy and the morbid as a starting point, visualizing a similarity between the tradition of how we culturally tell stories and how we regard animals. The text is underlined fragments from Ursula le Guin’s „My Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction“ that the artists had with them in the studio. It describes the function of an arrowlike narrative… a story arc as linear as the spear that killed the mammoth...

Dreaming documented by Kadri Sirel

CANCAN

by blogadmin | Dec 19, 2023 | WISHING MACHINE, #asymmetries, #choreography

The dark emancipatory motion of the cancan, a dance that originated in Paris in the 1800s, is reimagined without euphoria or climax, but proposed as a deconstructed landscape that loops its pieces into exhausted reiterations without a stop or an exit. Loose memory but automated bodies, internalised voyeurism, pessimistic repetition of leg, arm and ass movements. The dancers are keeping their heads down.

Inspired by Fabritia D’Intino’s residency with CANCAN and the shared training workshop based on the work, these traces collected from the studio build upon the Cancan as an entrapping system that perpetuates sexualizing dancers’ bodies, ending in a pessimistic loop that numbs the discoursive capacity of deconstruction to develop possible alternative scenarios. Fabritia’s process introduced the question, how long does re-organizing the same alphabet satisfy one’s illusion of freedom? How does one exit the Cancan?

Here are some balloons I picked up from the studio that help me wonder just that…