His work uses music, sound and choreography, and sometimes non-human presences, such as AI systems.
How did you come up with the concept of this performance?
A Dream That Belongs To No One is the first part of THE SAVED NIGHT, a multi-year project that investigates non-human presences. In this first chapter the focus is on inner images and dreams, which I consider to be an autonomous aspect of reality. The second part will focus on AI, the archive, and the dead, and the third part on the relationship between making images of animals and their extinction.
With A Dream That Belongs To No One I wanted to make a performance in which spectators might have a strong experience of their own inner images, and at the same time melt into a feeling of being with others. Today there are very few spaces in which individual subjectivity and collective belonging can be experienced at the same time, which is a political problem.
In the west there is tension between the Jewish tradition which bans images and the Greek which is possessed by them. Inner images and imagination have been the subject of conflict for a long time.
I think you can’t create a shift in perception through explanation or communication, which are popular strategies right now, but are a lot like the news or Instagram. Instead I wanted to organize sound, dance, time, light, a booklet, etc., to set up conditions so that spectators’ perception might shift in relation to this theme. But what this shift will be can’t be determined in advance, because it’s always related to whatever the individual brings in with them. So I wanted to make something free, open ended, which trusts that many different experiences of the work are valid – precisely because I believe that only in this freedom can a real rupture in perception appear.
On your website, you state that you “[…] want to create a space in which spectators are invited to experience something like imagination but not exactly.” Can you elaborate on that?
[laughs] It’s kind of a joke. In the last years people everywhere have been talking about a crisis of the imagination, how we can’t seem to imagine a sustainable future…
What we call imagination today is mostly “making things up”. It’s close to design, “creativity”, invention, which is a lot like what we have to do all the time in neoliberal capitalism – be smart and charming and sell our story.
There’s something else which is like imagination, but not. Usually this appears in a crisis, when a life event interrupts the way you understand the world. Certain artworks and practices, like working with dreams, can also do this. In this moment a gap appears, a blank space. And in this gap something unpredictable and alive might turn up. I love these moments. Like the arrival of any wild animal, it’s never guaranteed, but when it happens it feels like all the insane effort was worth it.
A Dream That Belongs To No One can be seen on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October during SPRING in Autumn at the Metaal Kathedraal. Click here for more information.
