DREAM STORY
When you walk together it is in the forest that is close by your house in the late afternoon. It is autumn in London but clear and bright, so that the facades of the tenements that you can see through the tree line are lit vividly yellow against the leaden grey of the sky. In a few hours the sunset will light the clouds on fire. The sky is huge and violently coiled above the canopy but down here you are sheltered; there is a sense of insulation and depth, of enormous distances. And anyway, you are more focused on the other. The time is spent well - you feel love and connection with this person, and you think that both of you are happy as you walk, sometimes chatting about deep and intense things or about art, but most of the time just walking together in comfortable silence. Occasionally you push your finger through the palm of your opposite hand to be sure that you are still unconscious, and that you still have total control over what happens in this place. You can do whatever you want, but never really allow yourself to fully explore this since of course your ethical structuring is extremely well developed and remains in full operational control, even down here in the luxurious depths of fabulation. After some time, the scene dissolves and you wake up and record the experience in detail so that later you will be able to share.
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The room is small and brushed obsessively clean. There is a small window, a desk and a chair that do not really fit the space, a bed frame and mattress, a lamp that can be adjusted to emit any colour. There is a bookshelf that contains fiction and also books of theory from several different artistic and critical-academic disciplines - not a lot of books but certainly a tightly curated collection. Outside there is a shared kitchen and bathroom, and other bedrooms that flower off from the central corridor. No shared living room, and nowhere to sit down in the kitchen. There is the invisible presence of anxiety, of small arguments and bad feeling. But perhaps this is unfair; you don’t know the people who live here. If these rooms are a portrait, it is a bad portrait, smudged and out of focus, the features not really lining up as they should, something maybe wrong with the eyes and the way that they never quite meet your gaze.
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Each night when you sleep you return to the forest, or you try to. Sometimes it is as easy as imagining the door and stepping through. But other times things go wrong. One night you find yourself pinned beneath a wreck of steel and glass, trying to move or scream out but unable to move your legs, unable to open your mouth. All you can do is move your hands across your naked stomach and chest, searching for what’s wrong, because something is wrong, rubbing your hands in circles in the thick liquid that covers your belly, tracing wet patterns, trying to make a sound. The trick of finding the door requires a degree of concentration. You try to calm down, to tamp down the panic that makes you a dying animal. You cannot find your other palm to push your finger through. Your hands will only move in flat circles across the slick skin of the stomach, and you cannot find what’s wrong. You wake yourself up and take notes.
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You are trying to invent a space where you can know one another without the mediation of language, a place where genuine empathy can be established. Inside this zone, situations and relations follow the logic of fantasy. You say that this is solidarity and remember that early on in the experiment there were talks of utopian experimentation; of developing a suite of tools to intervene in the violence of the city. The dream is a medium, a formal substrate, a testing zone where models and processes can have their capacities pushed until failure. Your bodies are young, tough, unafraid, invisible to security guards and camera systems, capable of vanishing, as in a magic trick, capable of sawing each other apart and then recombining the pieces without fear of lasting damage, physical or psychological, the soul and mind as invulnerable as the flesh. See yourself this way: a dreamer who, via miraculous alchemy, can produce themselves, instinctively, as you produce the door or the forest, free from any anxiety. You can throw this product into anything that your imagination can conceive of.
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When the apartment appears in the dream it is different, just like the forest, just like the body. This doesn’t stop you from recognising it instantly, but the patinas are gone, the space is fresh (or threatening, depending on the general tenor of the scene). There is no responsibility to accurately represent any space in particular, and there is something freeing in this recognition that does not depend on likeness. It is true of people and atmospheres as well as spaces. The apartment is a planning centre. It is where you gather your team of hyper-specialists. Where you pore over bank blueprints and the psych profiles of your deserving victims. Or it is a secret bunker where you can relax, play cards, read together, cook for one another, watch movies, all of this while the carnage outside continues with always-increasing intensity and viciousness. It is worse outside since you started this together. You don’t know if you have made it worse somehow or if you have simply become more sensitive to the symptoms, which these days you are aware of everywhere, flowing beneath things, their movements and shadows and vibrations affecting everything. They are black pinhole tunnels that burrow through the material substrate of your world and turn it to honeycomb. The surfaces look the same as they did before, but you are both aware that everything has changed.
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Now it is dark outside. Walking through the wreckage of the apartment you find that the doors in the hallway lead to the forest, and when you step through you understand that the path in the forest leads somewhere else as well, but you have never seen this other place. You do not know what will happen if you follow the road through the forest. Everything around you is traced out in silver moonlight, the rest is deep black shadow. The other is there with you too. You are suddenly aware that there is a group of people in the apartment behind you - they are following along behind, and you do not want to be found by them because they want to hurt you both. They are not really human, though you feel that you might recognise their faces. It would never occur to you in this moment to push your finger through your hand and assert high-level control over the space. When you wake you will think that it is panic that stops you from functioning - that same familiar panic of being trapped, of being unable to move. You need to escape. You need to find a door. But when you turn to say this, you realise that, although your mouth is working fine, you cannot form any words or sounds. You think for a second or two and try to transmit via your gaze, via pure telepathy. There is an evil feeling in air around you and you are frightened to take a breath, scared of ingesting any of this evil. The other tells you not to worry - it's not the evil, it’s the telepathy. This is what communication feels like with zero mediation. They tell you not to worry. You look at them and make eye contact and you transmit your message, which is absolutely precise: we have to leave before the others get here, we have to find somewhere new if we want to keep all of this in motion. We still have so much to explore together. But again, they say don’t worry. Stop worrying. You can go whenever you want. You can leave whenever you want. But not me, I have to stay here with them, even though I don’t want to. I cannot leave because I was born here.
Commissioned for Cow + Gate, September 2022, Sismografo, Porto.