I had a Dream
Having introduced the possibility that a story could be traded against a chop-shopped object, we were interested in testing the possibilities of inverting the process: stories could be subjected to a series of chop shopping actions rendered visible through performative objects. The protocols and the processes of chop shopping could be further scrutinised and considered in regard to their ‘efficacy’ as catalysing agents for art actions: when taking apart a story, reassembling parts into a new entity and bringing it into circulation, we would create a chain of different ‘work stations’ similar to those we had used to disassemble and reassemble clothes. The most exhaustive pool of possible stories humanity owns are dreams and this is the matter the collective project I had a Dream wished to activate.
Core stimuli for the development of the two related projects (chop shopping and I had a Dream) came through drawing processes – drawing graphs, drawing up of protocols and processes – that would be offered to participants who would test them to establish the feasibility and coherence of the work to be undertaken.
The mapping of the various parts of the actions also became the object of an art action which Donna Kukama organised in the context of the exhibition/lab organised in Lyon, in which all segments of the Protocols of I had a Dream were detailed on a wall map, serving as background and pretext for the lecture performance.
Video 'I had a dream' (no sound); video: Maddy Dymond, editing: Samuel Dématraz, performance: Khutjo Green, Thsego Khutsoane, drawings: Georges Pfruender - click to play
This project interrogates how dreams in their various forms can become source material for a collective art/theory project and explores possibilities of undertaking the mapping of dreamscapes and the development of modes of navigating across them.
We are interested in the exploration of dream narratives, which we have been collecting for over a year, and continue to do so, expecting that these singular narratives when brought together will allow for the creation of meta texts. These narratives also form the starting point for a series of transformative art actions, regulated by a set of protocols.
Some entry and exit points to an unruly transformative process involving dreams and art/thought production in I had a Dream, which are extracts from a text currently in development:
The protocols for I had a Dream are the following:
1. Recording of dreams: visitors and FUNDBÜRO participants are invited to note dream fragments on cards collected in a dream box.
2. Translation/collapsing of dreams through protocols and strategies into sketches, performances, and 3D prototyping of extracted elements, undertaken by the FUNDBÜRO team in Johannesburg and Lyon.
3. Creation of dream drawings on play cards composed as 3D-scapes, recordings of performances, and the archiving of 3D prototyped objects forming part of the strategies to render visible the collection of dreams that are brought to life via exhibitions, web archives, and expanded theatrical actions.
These three stages, though organised in sequence, are ultimately in conversation with one another and form a pattern or composition, informed by a large variety of inputs and by different participants.
Presentation of two films
We are aware of the complexity of the task – how to create a language that is neither translative nor interpretative but exploratory in nature and that would be adequate for working the field of dreams. As we retell and attempt to reconstitute parts of dreams, we use tools – the rational, the deductive, and the inductive – useful and appropriate to analysis in the waking world, but hopelessly inadequate when desiring to invest the dream world. Durs Grünbein (2012) suggests that the poet has privileged entry points, shaping her/his work in tune with dreams, through metaphors and analogies. Through the arts we might indeed be able to expand on dreams as generative, reflexive, and reflective spaces.
We wish to liberate the dream from the constraints of dream analysis, which immediately reflects the dream back on the dreamer as if the territory of meaning production of the dream were a singular path into the individual psyche. In the poem ‘Au Bord de l’Endormissement’, Aïgui tells Freud ‘Laissez-moi en paix’ (Issenhuth 1988). He asks for dreams to exist without commentary, without the framing devices and theoretical scaffolding that deprive it of a part of its essence.
We wish to investigate characteristics of dream states – those moments of ‘in-betweenness’, which we believe are core moments for the understanding of creative agency – moments that suggest the existence of another type of the ‘real’. To further inquire into the qualities and dimensionalities of this other reality, we need to rely on diverse theories and accumulated knowledge, of which we shall trace the core characteristics. This will help us map out visually and in writing the dream territories we collectively and individually inhabit (we may also call them spaces of imagination). We believe in the essential importance of dreams and think that somehow they make us ‘more’: more human, more singular, more receptive, more able to cope with what we might perceive at times as uninspiring or damaging contexts, and make us accept utopia and fiction as imminent possibilities for the future.
Play and dream:
Pierre Fédida suggests in the book L’Absence (1978) that in their operating and operative functions play and dream have common ground: play and dream are spaces that have a dimension of reality, which is firmly limited and regulated.
Il va sans dire que la question du rêve (et de l’interprétation) se trouvera au cœur de notre réflexion sur le jeu. Car non seulement le rapport du rêve au jeu demande à être éclairci mais l’interprétation peut-elle se passer, dans la notion analytique, de la référence opérante et opératoire au jeu? Autrement dit, il ne s’agit pas seulement de supposer que l’interprétation analytique soit ‘applicable’ au jeu comme au rêve, il nous faut nous demander quelle est la part du rêve et du jeu dans la définition opératoire de l’interprétation. C’est pourquoi une seule question pourrait orienter l’essentiel de mon propos: qu’en est-il de la création de sens? (Fédida 1978: 140)
Without doubt, the question of the dream and of its interpretation is situated at the core of our reflection on play. Not only does dream need to be clarified in relation to play but [we need to also raise the question] of whether the interpretation [of dream] in regard to notions of analysis can ignore the operative and operating references to play. In other words, it is not just a question of the analytical interpretation being ‘applicable’ to play and to dream, but of asking what the part of dream and play are in the operative definition of the interpretation. That is why a single question could direct the essence of my argument: what about the creation of sense? (Ibid., our translation)
The dream state is enveloped in and limited by the state of slumber; the play is regulated by protocols, and conventions. Play can only happen if each player accepts the challenge to be fully immersed in play and finishes when players or protocols call for the end. Dreams ‘come upon us’, and leave us in a totalising space of participant/author; only once awake can we make it ‘a thing outside us’. When Cynthia Kros speaks about the status and agency of field notes, she notes ‘rewriting in response to the voices of our predecessors’ as possibilities of ‘playing out (narratives) in our heads’. This play and replay of imagined dialogues is pertinent to the way we think of extracts from dreams and play. When awake, we replay dream excerpts in our heads. When stepping out of the spaces of game and dream, something shifts and we experience an awareness – this is neither the dream nor the play, but consciousness about an experience with its own transformative potential.
Player and dreamer are changed by the experiences of dream/play. Huizinga (1971) and Winnicott (1971) make a convincing case for the transformative quality of play on player and spectator. In the case of the dream, experience transforms the person experiencing it. ‘Play turns out to be the thing, or better still, a structuring element in the process of communicating development [. . .] Play fulfills the need to gainsay or un-say the world, to imagine and speak it otherwise, to build the milieu of social existence’ (Chinyowa: 2007). Similarly, one can argue that dreams transform the dreamers – indeed a dream can ‘change the colour of the world’ and make it other.
Tout rêve procède à la transmutation de l’univers du rêveur [. . .] Car un rêve change la couleur du monde. Pour modifier l’univers, le rêve agit par fragmentations d’abord, réduisant les images stockées dans la mémoire à leurs éléments puis par une nouvelle combinaison de particules dissociés. (Nathan 2013: 32)
All dreams change the universe of the dreamer [. . .] Because a dream changes the colour of the world. To alter the universe, the dream acts first through fragmentation, reducing images stored in the memory to its elements, then through a new combination of dissociated particles. (Ibid., our translation)
Fédida (1978) suggests that as individuals and as a society we are able to create the differentiation between inside and outside largely thanks to our capacity to dream, which then makes the state of waking something from which one can take distance and can be represented:
le dehors serait-il représentable? En somme, le rêve donnerait à l’homme le pouvoir d’avoir un monde dont son corps resterait l’espace – le seul espace qui puisse le protéger des menaces que la veille attribue au dehors. (Fédida 1978: 254)
Can the outside be represented? In sum, the dream would give to mankind the power to have a world whose body would remain the space – the sole space that would protect him from the threats that the state of awakeness attributes to the outside. (Ibid., our translation)
Dreams, in short, would be the transforming instance that allows us to come to consciousness and to identify ‘reality’ without being destroyed by it.
