John Duncan
Narcomantic – Dream of Insomnia Workshop
PERFORMANCE
17 February 2012
FAR – Villa Sucota
Watch on Vimeo
All-night solo concert and video projection. An experiment in hypnosis and dream manipulation of a voluntary audience as they sleep.
John Duncan (Wichita, Kansas 1953) is a visual artist, a pioneer of performance art and experimental audio who has worked in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Amsterdam. Duncan's events and installations have been held at Performa in New York, Färgfabriken and Gallery Niklas Belenius in Stockholm, The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, the NoorlandsOperan in Umeå, Netmage 07 (with Leif Elggren) in Bologna, Cut and Splice (with CM von Hausswolff) in London, and the 2nd Gothenburg Biennial. He has performed with and directed Ensemble Phoenix (in Basel and Bern, as well as for the Angelica Festival in Bologna), Musica Nova in Tel Aviv, Zeitkratzer in Berlin. His CD releases THE CRACKLING (1996 with Max Springer), PALACE of MIND (2001 with Giuliana Stefani), PHANTOM BROADCAST (2002), THE KEENING TOWERS (2003) and NINE SUGGESTIONS (2005 with Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen) are acclaimed by critics and composers as benchmarks of experimental music. His work in radio, video and performance has been shown at the Getty Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Osterreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna; Museu d'Arte Contemporani, Barcelona (MACBA); and Museum of Tokyo (MOT).
www.johnduncan.org
Dream of Insomnia Workshop
17-18 February 2012
curated by Éric Alliez in collaboration with Annie Ratti, Andrea Lissoni and Cesare Pietroiusti
In July 2011, Susan Hiller held The Dream Seminar II at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti. Not without a hint of provocation, the artist proposed reviving a project of the seventies in which she asked the participants to "take part in intensive group workshops focusing on individual dreams". It was a question of showing through dream that repetition is not a re-presentation, a re-make or a re-cycling in the form of an infinite retrospective devoid of perspective, since, on the contrary, repetition only serves to express a singularity, which makes the difference, by shifting the dream into life.
It is this experience that we wished to extend in the Dream of Insomnia Workshop, subverting the limits and boundaries of both dream and life. Drifting to the edge of sleep, where insomnia, sleepwalking and other mediumship take us into the night's intermediary zones, we convoked a critique, between theory and practice, of dreams and their interpretation a critique which no longer belongs to "the subject" of psychoanalysis.
Critique therefore in the primary sense of the topography of impure reason; but also Critique and Clinic, in a more experimental sense, of the dream as a highway of the unconscious that mixes desire with interpretation, at the end of which we will rediscover the dream, no longer as a dream of sleep or a daydream but as an insomniac dream.
The workshop was structured around lectures and artistic performances.