The Dream Life of Objects

The Dream Life of Objects, 2014
Performance-lecture

The Dream Life of Objects, is a performance written collaboratively with Annie McDonell. It consists of an hour long text, read aloud alongside a video projection (excerpt above).

The structure of the text is the crux of the piece – the multiplicity of its authors, the overlap of its narratives, its resistance to being tied to any singular instant or place. It is a story made up of reflection, repetition, memory lapse, superimposition and intersection. Figures walk in and out of scenes. Locations shift around figures in motion. “He” becomes “she”, “she” becomes “they”, day is traded for night as conversations overlap and dissolve. The only constants are the objects – these gloves, these unlit lamps, these dishes scattered across tabletops. They assert themselves through recurrence as images and words accumulate into the materiality of things. Objects are the solid cores around which the figures and locations spin, shift and merge. The camera moves in for a closeup, and when we cut wide, the object remains, while everything around it has shifted.

The work consist of a text read aloud and a silent video projection, excerpted above. It uses a series of overlapping stories, both personal and borrowed, real and fictional, to describe the function of objects in our memories and anecdotes. The video is made up of a long sequence of still images : furniture, gloves, rugs, chairs, statuettes, mirrors, film stills, scanned book pages and textiles, Atget’s photographs of domestic interiors, objects from Freud’s study.

It was performed by Maïder Fortuné, in November of 2013, as part of the curatorial project“Le Tamis et le Sable”, by Anne-Lou Vincente, Raphaeil Brunel, Antoine Marchand, 2013, Maison Populaire de Montreuil.