Emilio FantinDream and Death, workshop, Swaraj University, Udaipur, 2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Dreams, Art: Towards the Depth of Things

Art opens a path to the hidden aspects of the world. Exploring the depths of existential experience does not represent a divorce from reality, but it tends to highlight the limits of cognitive processes by overwhelming familiar feelings, behaviours, mental processes, and ways of imagining. This is where art’s social and political potential lies. Another activity, which exists in most animals, including humans, has similar potential: dreaming.

When we dream, images take shape from assembled fragments of individual and collective identity, and they give way to situations and experiences in which different dimensions of reality are explored. A dream can take us to unconventional places: imaginary realms that we didn’t think were possible to reach; and inner, distant, troubled territories that cannot be confronted in the waking state. Thus dreaming, like art, allows us to broaden our perception of reality and to question certainties.

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