Catalogue > At random

Songwriter Dion McGregor became famous in the 1960s for narrating his dreams in his sleep. His flatmate recorded him doing so. In their new film somniloquies, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel overcome the boundaries between inner dreamscapes and human bodies. At the start, flowing forms can be seen and a gentle, undefinable sound made out in the background. McGregor's voice appears and makes an invitation: “I have expected you, come-on in, I said I would grant an interview”. The more we listen to him and enter into his dreamworld, the clearer the contours of the sleeping bodies become, before they seem to dissipate once again. The dreaming man speaks with people who are sawing open his body, removing his organs and stitching him back up. As we find out how painful he finds the stitches, we ask ourselves for how long we’ll want to follow the camera, which sometimes seems to caress the bodies tenderly, but at other times seeks to pierce them almost brutally, like an x-ray. Just in time, we hear his voice: "Let’s go to future land (…) it’s shining near the corner". In this case, sleeping in the cinema means pushing forward to its very limits.

Véréna Paravel born in 1971 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, born in 1966, in Liverpool, are both artists and anthropologists who work in film, video and photography. They work and live in US. Véréna Paravel studied Anthropology at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and at the University of Toulouse. Lucien Castaing-Taylor studied Philosophy, Theology, and Anthropology, and is a professor of Visual Arts and Anthropology at Harvard University. In the process of reinventing the relationship between their two fields of inquiry, anthropology and cinema, they have established in 2008 an experimental laboratory and school at Harvard University, the Sensory Ethnography Lab. The films coming out of the lab take a decentered approach to the visual practice of the moving image. Their camera does not focus primarily on humans as privileged actors in the world but rather on the fabric of affective relations among the natural elements, animals, technology, and our physical lifeworlds. Their films have received several awards, namely the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) Award, a Creative Capital Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Circle Douglas Edwards Independent and Experimental Film Award. Thirteen of their moving image works were also included in the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial.