Collective Fabulations: Propositions for social dreaming

Collective Fabulations: Propositions for social dreaming

With Erin Manning (Canada)

http://erinmovement.com/collective-dreaming/

2019 – Sao Paulo Brazil, Montreal, Utopania Geneva, Latrobe Art Institute Bendigo

This is the third collaborative work between artists Erin Manning and Andrew Goodman to propose environments that open the potential for new complex and trans-personal ecologies to resonate across a number of registers activating more-than-human agencies. Here we draw on Le Guin’s speculative short story The Collective Dreaming of the Frin about a people who share their dreams, developing a collective sensitivity to the lives they share in their sleep. Dreams, we propose, are collective fabulations that expose experience to an excess that lies outside daily actualisations of existence. Our project will activate speculative diagrams that map not the Freudian interiority of a dreamscape but the collective plane where dreams trouble the notion of the self-enclosed subject, where “dreams elude their dreamers on every plane” (Le Guin 14). Here dreams might be triggers for emergent connectivity between sleepers, compressing space and time into a collective, social and ecologically generative act.