Karl Holmqvist
Word Text Vortex – Dream of Insomnia Workshop
PERFORMANCE
17 February 2012
FAR – Villa Sucota
Watch on Vimeo
Karl Holmqvist shared some of his recent studies on the life and work of Ezra Pound. The typically learned and distantly observing position famously taken by the poet in his writings using frequent citations in a host of original languages etc. nonetheless led Pound to the twin disasters of him endorsing Mussolini's fascist regime during WWII and his subsequent incarceration in the U.S. for national treason. These dramatic events set the frame for a presentation by artist Karl Holmqvist, and a reflection on possible positions for art in present-day society between being a means of elitist exclusion or a democratic tool of self-expression. Or somehow possibly both. Language itself seems to hover between something like the redundant journalist's speak's lack in nuance and the possibly endless symbolisms, double meanings and ambiguities found in poetry (and the story-lines of dreams).
Parts of this presentation was published later in the spring by JRPRingier as an artist's book in association with Kunsthalle Zürich and Bergen Kunsthall.
Karl Holmqvist is a frequent participant in international exhibitions as a poet and performer as well as visual artist, most notably in the IllumiNations section of 54th Venice Biennial, in The Poetry Marathon and Manifesto Marathon organized by The Serpentine Gallery in London and the project Ecstatic Alphabets at Moma, New York.
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.