When dreaming is treated as a real praxis, and the dream as just another medium, like the actual world, then to pass from waking life to the dreamworld is to switch between equally existent worlds, to travel from one medium to another. The transversal navigation between these worlds-as-medium, between these full behavioral spaces, is made possible by the disruptive moments of waking up and falling asleep. The black box of performance is a medium that resembles the oneiric space, since it is also not taken for granted as being real, or is rather thought to be cut off from the surrounding reality. It is usually said that in order to reach the real world, one has to wake up from the black box. But what if the real itself is a black box? What if waking up from art to reality is like travelling from box to box?

If power today operates environmentally, it does so by treating fictions as true in a world that is like a black box. The transference of knowledge and practices between the black box and the dreamworld are relevant now, as the only way to respond to the oneiric sovereignty of capital seems to be to overdream, to accelerate the dreaming not of fictional and alternative worlds, but of reality itself. If the world is treated as the black box, what does it entail to treat the dream as real? The answer to this question is all the more interesting now when many signs indicate that we may be in a process of extinction. It is important to imaginatively and practically speculate about what happens when the worlds are ending. A starting point for this could be the special dream in which you constantly wake up only to realize that you are actually in another dream. You are just falling from a dream into another dream, from one box into another (black) box, dreaming the end of dreaming.

With the event »Dreaming the End of Dreaming«, the two Romanian artists and fellows in the program art, science & business Alina Popa and Florin Flueras take up the notion of the dream as a real praxis, presenting lectures by the Argentine philosopher Gabriel Catren, the Brazilian literary and cultural theorist of Latin America Deneb Kozikoski, and the Canadian researcher Blake Victor. The presentations will be followed by the performance »Eternal Feeding« by Florin Flueras and Alina Popa at 9 p.m. on the same day. From July 4 to July 7, there will be a workshop with the invited lecturers and the Romanian artists Ion Dumitrescu, Bogdan Draganescu and Adriana Gheorghe.

Participants:

  • Gabriel Catren, philosopher, Paris/France
  • Florin Flueras, artist, Bucharest/Romania
  • Deneb Kozikoski, literary and cultural theorist of Latin America, New York, N.Y./USA
  • Alina Popa, artist, Bucharest/Romania
  • Blake Victor, researcher, New York, N.Y./USA

Program

FRIDAY, JULY 03, 2015

  • 4.00 p.m. Alina Popa, Florin Flueras, Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff: Welcoming Remarks and Introduction
  • 4.45 p.m. Deneb Kozikoski: »Calling Sister Midnight: The End of the Seizure of Dreaming for Political Ends«
  • 5.30 p.m. Break
  • 5.45 p.m. Blake Victor: »Stalking the Chiasmatic Cataract: Posthistorical Intelligence and the Lost Arts of Dreaming«
  • 6.30 p.m. Gabriel Catren: »The Phenoumenodelic Fields«
  • 7.30 p.m. Dinner
  • 9.00 p.m. Alina Popa, Florin Flueras: Performance »Eternal Feeding«

The workshop will be held in English. Admission to this event is free. Per diem meal allowance: 9 euros regular/7 euros for students.

Please register until June 29, 2015 via email to Annika Etter: ae[at]akademie-solitude.de