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.