The common denominator is an interest in imagination: its history, myths, and methods.
For the occasion Friedl has created the website Daydream Factory (from a concept developed in 2012, in the course of his teaching at NABA in Milan) where to gather daydreams as research material. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute their daydreams.
We know about the career of nightly dream activity from Romanticism through Modernism in art, culture, and science. One of the first to problematize the dream text was arguably Gérard de Nerval. For psychoanalysis, which arose at exactly the same time as cinema, the dream became a language requiring decoding, and like every interpretation, it reduced what was interpreted. The surrealists largely ignored the difference between dream and dream text. In Dream Kitsch (1925), Walter Benjamin’s first published commentary on Surrealism, the archaeologist of modernity clear-sightedly declared, “Dreaming has a share in history.” The path to the dreaming collective was hereby sketched out.
In deliberate distinction from Sigmund Freud, French philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard placed reverie opposite dream. His gay, poetic science revolved around the border realms of rationality and their availability through images. The dark side of history can be found in Charlotte Beradt’s anthology from the 1930s, first published many years later: In The Third Reich of Dreams, dreams become historical documents.
The neglected little brother of the night-time dream is the daydream. Its biotope can be found in modernity’s backyards and unspectacular niches. Daydreams are both means of subversion and subordination; they remind us of our freedom and confinement under given circumstances. Daydreams belong to those forms of “doing nothing” that compose the everyday world of the uneventful. As a reference point for their examination, we can use the question asked by German sociologist Georg Simmel in 1908: “How is society possible?”
until April 12
Peter Friedl
Touch of Joy
Exercises in Imagination
Istituto Svizzero di Roma
Via Ludovisi 48, Roma