(Yelim)
I relate my practice as an engineering tool, where I manipulate the subconscious by distorting physical expectations. By hanging paintings from the ceiling to disrupt conventional momentum, I shift the focus from the image content to the sculptural situation of the painting in space. I also want to program and design custom Gobo lighting to project artificial window shadows, creating a nocturnal state that fluctuates between alignment and misalignment with natural external light.

~~~EMMA~~~

sophie calle - the sleepers
book and photography series
excerpt from the book presented here, I love sophie's journey to becoming an artist and how she always works with such personal, intimate topics <3

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/11/18/third-sleeper-bob-garison/#more-168993
https://sigliopress.com/titles/the-sleepers-sophie-calle/

In introducing the work Calle wrote that she “asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep. To come sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. To answer questions. To each participant I suggested an eight hour stay, that of a normal sleep. I contacted 45 persons by phone: people I didn’t know and whose names were suggested to me by common acquaintances, a few friends, and residents of the neighborhood whose work called on them to sleep during the day: the baker for instance. I intended my bedroom to become a constantly occupied space for eight days, with sleepers succeeding one another at regular intervals…”

THE BACKPACK KPT PAGE

SLEEPING, DREAMING, BEDROOMS AND THE MONSTROUS

I couldn't resist bringing up Franz Kafka's story,
The Metamorphosis.

I think this story touches on many different aspects of monstrosity in this time. Not just the alienation of the self in comparison to the system, but also the alienation of the self within the self and the alienation from others.

Gregor Samsa wakes up one day and notices that he transformed into an insect/monster. That is the main event and in the rest of the story we read how people and he himself reacts and reflects on this metamorphosis of the body, mind and life in general.
I touches different interesting subjects, I think.
The dehumanization of workers/people who are only valued if they are physically and mentally fit to work. It also touches on language; Gregor can't communicate with his family because he can only make strange sounds. Makes me think of “the other” who doesn't speak the same language and/or looks different is easily called the monster.

The story takes place largely in Gregor Samsa's bedroom. This image also sticks with me: a kind of isolation, the anxiety of going outside. A room where your own reality is also questioned, alone with your thoughts, dreams, and stories.
I also think of all the bedrooms I had as a person and how they have this kind of older version of me in there.

It's just a classic story on monstrosity. Big change, you already read it.
I also like how it starts. ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he…’


https://giove.isti.cnr.it/demo/eread/Libri/calm/Metamorphosis.pdf

I also read this book; A man Asleep, by George Perec. (NL: Een man die slaapt. FR: Un homme qui dort). It's a really nice written book, with lots of nice descriptions of sounds, objects, thoughts. It's about a man who decides to stay home, and just to do nothing. Because he no longer sees the point of doing things. But he soon realises he is part of this world and he moves with it. So we most of the time stay in his room, his bed, or we make walks across Paris. And we read the things he does, sees, hears, thinks, described in poetic detail. But because he is not really doing anything it also feels a bit like a dream? A really boring dream haha or a state of sleep, that is also why it’s called; A man Asleep.

These 2 things are written by men and I”m actually more focussed on woman writers lately. I do not have a book or a feminine writer that pops in my mind right now with this themes. Or, yes, maybe Audry Lorde but I do not know her good enough yet.
But I do like the work of Tracey Emin (Works: My bed 1998, To meet my past 2002). We already talked about her, I think. But what I find really nice about her work on the bed, is the absence of her (body). And what a bed means, the intimacy of it. She also talked about her old self who was once laying in that bed, but she is not that person anymore, she transformed! I like the personal element, but is it also a bit too personal for me.


https://imagejournal.org/article/empty-bed-tracey-emin-persistent-self/

note:
The monster under the bed, is also an image/feeling/metafoor I can't get out of my head. The imagination of something to be afraid of.
I think I really want to do something with the alienation of this time and how to keep yourself sane, in a way. For me this is also really about the monsters in this world, the monster that is me. And the confusion about who is the real monster?
what is a monster?
And I really feel like the setting has to be a bedroom. Because the monsters are under my bed, but are also in me, in dreams, and outside. This bedroom can be very abstract, I think, a suggestion to a bedroom.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-13508-8_5.pdf
I also found this text about monstrosity, monsters and heroes, in society. I have not read it fully yet, but I think it is nice research material.

Ps. I have one more thing. My housemate recommended this movie called Dreams by, Akira Kurosawa. It does not really have a plot. The movie is constructed in 8 different parts. Maybe I'll watch it tonight.

JULIE :)

<<<< sexing the cherry by jeanette winterson

fighting injustice, an excerpt of a woman researching and protesting near a polluted river, the pollution gets to her - the unjust makes her insane - monstrous. she imagines herself extremely large, disgusting almost. how she sees herself is reflected outward.

"Not if he pulled back my eyelids, not if he peeped into my ears, not if he looked down my throat with a torch, not if he listened to my heartbeat with a stethoscope. He'd run out of the room holding his head. He'd see her, the other one, lurking inside. She fits, even though she's so big.

the hope that the logic of dreams might offer, when the linearity and momentum of reality are more dystopian and chaotic than dreams

That hope stems not from the content of dreams, but from their structure and composition.

Whether dreams are ideal or not, in this world that is deteriorating to such an extreme degree of malice and radicalism, we may be able to find hope in the discontinuity of dreams.
(However, even if dreams are fragmentary, they correspond to reality and exist in a complementary relationship.)

How do dreaming, bedrooms, sleeping, storytelling/ the monstrous, relate to my artistic practice?

I have recreated my bedroom before in an installation about collective grieving, finding personal, intimate spaces in public and use them as a comfortable space to stimulate reconnection after the covid pandemic. I created my room, a space all of us were bound to for a long period of time, in an expo space in my academy. there people got to lay down, have breakfast and talk to me and each other about this challenging period in all our lives.

Storytelling is essential, to tell stories is as old as time and is always what I want to do, no matter the medium. A story can be translated into an experience. Dreaming, not in a “i slept and dreamt” kind of way but more a: dreaming up alternative worlds, fantasies, systems is something that resonates more with my artistic practice. The monstrous/monstrosity is not something that necessarily ever appears in my work, I think the world we live in today is already full of monsters and is kind of horrible so I don’t enjoy addressing that so literally in my art. However, I am interested in female rage and the state of the world in general so I’m curious to find ways to relate this definition to my fascinations and find an output for it.

I work mostly from a personal perspective, my experiences, emotions, fascinations give me direction within my practice.
So perhaps writing, creating around my lack of dreaming, my process to fall asleep etc.

I listen to asmr a lot, specific sounds, so I thought about a bedroom-like installation with a quilt(s?) and a soundscape that I created. The phase of the fall, the: getting to sleep?
But sleep is nothingness to me, many thoughts i can have just before falling asleep, a joint perhaps, soms asmr, writings on the wall. But sleep is nothingness, can I visualize that? what if we all create rooms/spaces that visualize our dreams, our personal sleep routines visualized in a public setting.
The intimate turned outward.