The “missing hour” referenced in the title alludes to the wakeful interval that divided, in pre-industrial times, the slumber of the working classes into two segments. It makes reference to the one less hour we sleep today than we did only a century ago, before the full impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The attempt to regulate our biorhythms in modern times is facilitated through elements such as artificial light, daylight savings time, and the circulation of common psychoactive drugs like caffeine. Nowadays, to this list we can add the colonisation of rest itself as a space of productivity. Dreams, desires and aspirations have gone from being companions of our sleep to algorithmic constructions that discipline our social network feeds and influence our purchases, approaching a state in which we never detach ourselves from our primary role as consumers.
Among the works exhibited is the installation NoMoreSleepNoMore, which takes as its starting point the function of a sleep machine and the white noise it produces to presumably erase all sounds from a room, thereby creating the ideal conditions for sleep.
Comprised of an eighty-minute video and seven framed and unframed images on the walls, the work is inspired by conversations between the artists and American experts on the subject of sleep: an anthropologist, an historian and a physician who presents the main thread of the exhibition. The wide cognitive scope disclosed through these dialogues is interweaved with a progression of images of moving coloured fluids, composed during the year the interviews were made as a visual residue of the hours of sleep deprivation the artist endured.
from 13 February to 13 March 2015
Danilo Correale
“The Missing Hour: Rhythms and Algorithms”
curated by Matteo Lucchetti
Galleria Raucci Santamaria
Corso Amedeo di Savoia 190, Napoli