Polish Performance Archive

Description by Filmoteka Muzeum

Initiated in 1978, the cycle Dreaming explores the meaning of falling asleep and dreaming as simple expressions of the everyday, which prove important for understating the essence of intuitive cognition. For that matter, Natalia LL conducts her tests in various situations: after taking sleeping pills, she falls asleep right in front of the guests gathered at the gallery (as in the present performance at BWA Awangarda in Wrocław in 2005), she carries out individual sessions for the camera and photographs people in their sleep. Her experiments allowed her to discern two layers of dreaming: the ‘internal’ (in the form of dreams accessible exclusively to the sleeping person) and the ‘external’ (the body of the sleeping person visible to others). The inaccessibility and untranslatability of dreams becomes a metaphor of art-based cognition: internal, intuitive, quasi-logical, and therefore closer to human mental structure than scientific cognition.

References: Natalia LL, Śnienie; We śnie i na jawie. Śnienie, [in:[ Natalia LL – texty, Bielsko-Biała – Wrocław 2004.
 

(AK)