\u201cWhat if art desires to be interpreted?\u201d asks art historian Griselda Pollock, in her reappraisal of the efficacy of psychoanalysis as an interpretive lens.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Griselda Pollock, \u201cWhat if Art Desires to be Interpreted? Remodelling Interpretation after the \u2018Encounter-Event,\u2019\u201d Tate Papers<\/em> 15 (Spring 2011), accessible online.<\/span> And what if it doesn\u2019t? What if interpretation is itself an extractive and violent act\u200a\u2014\u200asomething akin to a \u201chungry listening\u201d with eyes as much as ears?4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).<\/span> For Freud, dreams are the road to the unconscious. They cipher latent thoughts into manifest dream images through processes of condensation and displacement. The therapeutic aim of the psychoanalytic process of interpretation is to unravel the dreamwork by converting these images into words so that the psyche can metabolize undigested traumatic events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, Serri and Alsharif resist this interpretative process. They rest in the navel\u2019s opacity, at the place in the dream that exceeds the hermeneutic impulse\u200a\u2014\u200athe imagistic topos<\/em>, or place, of the dream\u2019s birth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n After all, as the Martinican poet and philosopher \u00c9douard Glissant argues, opacity is not the reverse of transparency. It is not obscurity. Rather, it signals resistance to erasure.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - \u00c9douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation<\/em>, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).<\/span> Countering dominant frames of war, their subjective and deeply political topographies mobilize the resistant opacity of dreams to regenerate connection to geographies fractured by migration and military occupation.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? <\/em>(New York: Verso, 2009).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00c9milie Serri was not born in Syria. Unlike her father, she is unable to speak Arabic. On her last trip to visit her father\u2019s family in Damascus, in 2010\u200a\u2014\u200abefore her grandmother died, before the Arab Spring, and before Bashar al-Assad\u2019s brutal reprisals drove the country into a civil war that displaced ten million people\u200a\u2014\u200ashe captured the city in the grainy black-and-white photographs that punctuate her experimental documentary Damascus Dreams<\/em> (2021). Her hybrid film stitches together a portrait of the city in which she has never lived from fragments of her father\u2019s memories, home movies, family photographs, dream re-enactments, and interviews with Syrian refugees in Montr\u00e9al. Part travelogue, part essay film, part lament for a city imperilled by war, Damascus Dreams<\/em> weaves a landscape of memory and dream during a time when Syria was becoming increasingly unreachable. Serri grapples with loss and inheritance, asking how Syria will be remembered and passed on to future generations in the diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before any image appears on screen, we hear Serri\u2019s childhood voice. \u201cDormez-vous\u2009?\u201d she asks, reciting the familiar lullaby that invites us to enter the dream world for which cinema has long been considered an analogy.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - The dream analogy has a long history in film theory that serves to link cinema and psychoanalysis. See Laura Rascaroli, \u201cOneiric Metaphor in Film Theory,\u201d KINEMA<\/em> (Fall 2002), accessible online.<\/span> Rather than absorbing us into its narrative, Damascus Dreams<\/em> opens space for our own dreaming, setting us on an ambulatory drift among fragments that resist spatial, temporal, and logical order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our journey begins with the story of Serri\u2019s father\u2019s family, who owned Cin\u00e9-Dunia, one of the first movie theatres in Damascus. She juxtaposes a melodic reconstruction of her memory of the Bakdash ice cream parlour in Al-Hamadiyeh Souq with slow tracking shots through the ruins of bombed-out apartment blocks. Her compulsively slow-moving tableaux displace Damascus to Montr\u00e9al\u2019s winter streets. In one scene, the camera pans slowly past a surrealistic picnic of oranges, dates, and pomegranates as it is slowly buried beneath a blanket of snow. In another, Serri appears as a child in a sequence from her family\u2019s home movies. She is speaking to her grandmother on the telephone, an umbilical cord that reaches down into the unknown hole that knots together the film\u2019s fragmentary form, connecting her to her dreamed-of homeland. She repeats the excerpt throughout the film, decomposing it, commenting on it, interpreting it. She screens it for her sleeping father in her family\u2019s empty movie theatre. The leitmotif brings us to the dream-navel, the figurative place articulated using an anatomical metaphor for where the body was last joined to its maternal origins. Lacan calls the navel an \u201cumbilical hole,\u201d linking it to the site of separation\u200a\u2014\u200aa scar, he says, that makes a knot in the body.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Jacques Lacan, \u201c\u2018L\u2019ombilic du r\u00eave est un trou\u2019 : Jacques Lacan r\u00e9pond \u00e0 une question de Marcel Ritter,\u201d La Cause du d<\/em>\u00e9sir 102 (June 2019): 35\u200a\u2013\u200a43 (our translation).<\/span> Serri\u2019s film circulates around this primal scene of separation from the maternal country of origin\u200a\u2014\u200aher grandmother\u2019s territory. Each iteration is caught up in a repetition compulsion that tries to master its disappearance from her memory. Serri\u2019s strategy: saturate the absence with images. Her dream-archive works to re-establish links of kinship to the elsewhere that eludes her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n But Damascus Dreams<\/em> is not simply autobiographical; rather, it opens itself to an ethics of alterity. Drawing on the pioneering work of the US-born British \u201cpara-conceptual\u201d artist Susan Hiller, Serri elucidates dreams not as individual experience but as shared phenomenon. In her experimental performance Dream Mapping<\/em> (1974), Hiller gathered a group of participants in the fields of Hampshire, England, to sleep inside \u201cfairy rings\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200anaturally occurring arcs of mushrooms that have long been the subject of paranormal and folkloric speculation. Each morning, the participants sketched composite images of their dream spaces in a single cartography, condensing their dreams into a collective vision. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Hiller, Serri traces a collective dream. In one haunting scene, she gathers a group of Syrian migrants before a boat in the dead of winter, its skeletal hull evoking the trajectories of illegalized migration that link and separate the Black Mediterranean and Fortress Europe. This performative re-enactment invokes the mute opacity of water that separates what Glissant calls the dreamed-of -country (pays r\u00eav\u00e9<\/em>) from the real one (pays r\u00e9el<\/em>).9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - \u00c9douard Glissant, Pays r\u00eav\u00e9, pays r\u00e9el\u200a <\/em>\u2013 \u200aFastes \u200a<\/em>\u2013\u200a Les grands chaos<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).<\/span> The resulting composite image of a city transformed by distance and political violence doesn\u2019t exist geographically\u200a\u2014\u200aSerri\u2019s portrait of Damascus, cobbled together from a patchwork of fiction, testimony, and archival images, exists somewhere between past and present, pays r\u00eav\u00e9<\/em> and pays r\u00e9el<\/em>, the one erupting into the other in a bricolage dream for survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Damascus Dreams<\/em> is quietly political. Its reliance on dreams resonates deeply with the Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas\u2019s 1987 documentary Al-Manam<\/em> (The Dream<\/em>). In 1980, Malas travelled to Lebanon, where he recorded the dreams of Palestinians living in refugee camps around Beirut. Motivated in part by his desire to understand his father, who died fighting for Palestine, Malas\u2019s haunting film archives dreams of lost lands against the backdrop of an unending civil war. The people he interviews recount dreams of democracies and quivering olive trees. They drown under starlit skies. The dead return. But Malas resists giving us a political interpretation of their dreams. We are left to decipher them for ourselves, with the unbearable foreknowledge that just months after he completed filming, Israel would allow its Lebanese allies to enter the Shatila camp to massacre two thousand Palestinians\u200a\u2014\u200aalong with their dreams, which rise from the screen like spectral delegates sent into the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Decades later, Serri interviews a group of Syrians in Montr\u00e9al. But whereas Malas\u2019s subjects recount their dreams with candour, Serri\u2019s fall silent. They stumble on their words. They begin again. They don\u2019t remember much of their dream lives. They recall the scent of jasmine in the city\u2019s winding streets, but this sensory archive is shrouded by a more generalized will towards the forgetting of dreams. Attentive to the silences and the repression that produce them, in Damascus Dreams<\/em> Serri listens for absences. She is attentive to the opacity of dreams\u200a\u2014\u200athe strange ways that their images make themselves heard, through interference and interruption, camouflaging the desires and fears that knot together their shared dreamworld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas Serri reconstructs Damascus from heterogeneous dream fragments, Basma Alsharif examines Palestine\u2019s fragmented and disappearing topography. Mobilizing strategies of structural film, Deep Sleep<\/em> (2014) begins with abrasive flickering colours and rhythmically oscillating sounds that lull the viewer into a hypnotic state. Recently installed in KADIST\u2019s San Francisco screening space, Deep Sleep <\/em>evokes cinema\u2019s oneiric spectatorial condition, inviting the viewer into a visceral confrontation with displacement as lived political reality. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, refused citizenship by France, then naturalized in the United States, Alsharif is deeply connected to Gaza and her Palestinian heritage. Her hallucinatory dreamscape invokes the phenomenon of bilocation\u200a\u2014\u200aa paranormal or mystical experience of being in two distinct places at once\u200a\u2014\u200aas an analogy for the embodied experience of being riven between places and denied the right of return to a territory that has become increasingly inaccessible over decades of conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The flashes of colour quickly give way to diaristic footage in an associative audiovisual flow shot in various states of autohypnosis across locations in Malta, Athens, and Gaza. Alsharif appears on screen, guiding us like a somnambulist through the porticos of the agora, birthplace of Athenian democracy and self-governance denied to her people. Shotgun microphone in hand, she collects echoes refracting off the ruins of ancient civilizations: the shrill drone of cicadas, the soft caress of waves, the sharp attack of a bell slowing and reversing. A smooth-bodied mare slides backwards across the frame, disappearing into a past that is never dead. Below a cloudless sky, a peacock roams the parched earth. The sun flares into the camera, scattering light in concentric rings. A finger points to the distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The arresting image of pointing fingers recurs throughout the short experimental film, invoking the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce\u2019s theory of signs. Peirce cites the pointing finger as a paradigmatic example of the \u201cindirect index,\u201d which needs to be adjacent to its object to communicate its meaning.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Charles Sanders Peirce, \u201cOn the Algebra of Logic,\u201d in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce<\/em>, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 211. Also see Mary Ann Doane, \u201cThe Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,\u201d Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies<\/em> 18, no. 1 (2007): 128\u200a\u201352.<\/span> Alsharif\u2019s gesture directs our attention to a shifting horizon. \u201cThere!\u201d it says, forcefully taking hold of our eyes. \u201cThere again!\u201d But each time, the referent is deferred to a future that never arrives. One place stands in for another, is \u201cdisplaced\u201d (to use Freud\u2019s terminology), or \u201canalogized\u201d (to use Lacan\u2019s). In the dream image, one thing always represents something else. Alsharif\u2019s images find Gaza in the ruins of Malta and Athens. Her hypnotic \u201cpan-geographic shuttle\u201d between \u201cdifferent sites of modern ruin\u201d directs our attention to the operation of shifting itself\u200a\u2014\u200ato the inexorable movement that the occupation produces in those it displaces.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Basma Alsharif quoted in \u201cBasma Alsharif: Working with, and through, conflict,\u201d interview by Aily Nash, BOMB Magazine<\/em>, March 12, 2015, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Deep Sleep<\/em> limns Occupied Palestine without showing the necropolitical violence cyclically inflicted upon it. Yet, there is still violence here. Alsharif\u2019s film unravels the psychic undertow that flows between images and bodies. She does not show us the brutality of occupation but the effect of dispossession that it produces in the more than two million displaced Palestinians who live across fractured geographies. The navel of her allusive dreamscapes, the place from which they are born and for which her work struggles, marks what Alsharif, in her 2019 installation A Philistine<\/em>, calls\u201chereditary sitelessness,\u201d a technology of disinheritance mobilized in the context of occupation.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Jonah Goldman Kay, \u201cBasma Alsharif,\u201d Artforum Artguide <\/em>(website), accessed June 8, 2024, accessible online.<\/span> Israel\u2019s levelling of territory every few years with bombs and bulldozers, says Alsharif, is a tactical strategy deployed to erase the narrative of the place.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Basma Alsharif and Gautam Valluri, \u201cThe Wanderer\u2019s Home Movies: An Interview with Basma Alsharif,\u201d Projectorhead<\/em>, June 2016, accessible online.<\/span> The film\u2019s spatiotemporal discontinuities, condensed overlays, and chroma-keyed landscapes are knotted around this umbilical hole passed down through generations. But nothing permits us to say the navel is empty. The title of Alsharif\u2019s film also refers to a stage of restorative slow-wave sleep, suggesting that the opacity of dreams, and the sleep that protects it, resists this erasure, regenerating connection to place in defiance of all attempts to destroy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of these films, I feel as if I have just awoken\u200a\u2014\u200adisoriented and questioning. The snaking images of Damascus Dreams<\/em> and Deep Sleep<\/em>invite us to weave our own interpretive path through their jetsam stream of oneiric fragments and emotional debris. Lyrical and affecting, their searching memory palaces are deeply rooted in place and personal history, but they also speak to the collective condition of the diaspora, displaced by generations, conflict, and occupation. Their dream spaces are unreconciled, ambiguous, evasive. To keep Damascus from disappearing, Serri asks us to participate in the task of collectively dreaming a city we do not know. Yet, as film theorists Raymond Bellour and Guy Rosolato write, films, like dreams, are susceptible to oblivion because of the oneiric condition that the spectator experiences at the cinema.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Raymond Bellour and Guy Rosolato, \u201cDialogue: Remembering (this memory of) a Film,\u201d trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in E. Ann Kaplan ed., Psychoanalysis & Cinema<\/em> (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 198\u200a\u2013\u200a216.<\/span> But the reverse is also true: Alsharif\u2019s coalescent sounds and images do not stop working on us when we leave the theatre\u200a\u2014\u200athey occupy our bodies, disorienting and unsettling us. They seep into our unconscious, flashing up in fragments that challenge our understanding of political violence.15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Roland Barthes, \u201cLeaving the Movie Theatre,\u201d in The Rustle of Language<\/em>, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 345\u200a\u2013\u200a50.<\/span> If these films refuse to give us answers, it is because they demand that we engage somatically in the work of analysis\u200a\u2014\u200aeven at its limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An image theorist and \u00adindependent curator, Gwynne Fulton holds a PhD in philosophy and art history from Concordia University. Her writings on contemporary film and photography have appeared in Esse art + opinions<\/em>, Mosaic<\/em>, InVisible Culture<\/em>, ARP Books, \u00c9ditions J\u2019ai VU, Dazibao editions, and Espace art actuel<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP_LT_08-EXTRA.jpg\")
Deep Sleep,<\/em> video still, 2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nDamascus Dreams<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Emilie-Serri_manholdingbwpicture\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Emilie-Serri_manholdingbwpicture_05-scaled.jpg\")
Damascus Dreams<\/em>, video still, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Susan-Hiller_S73_Dream-Field-full-image.jpg\")
Dream Mapping (participants sleeping in a field at Purdies Farm, Hampshire)<\/em>, 1974.
\u00a9 Estate of Susan Hiller
Photo: David Coxhead, courtesy of Estate of Susan Hiller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Susan-Hiller_S730003_composite-scaled.jpg\")
Dream Mapping (selection of individual dream maps)<\/em>, 1974.
\u00a9 Estate of Susan Hiller
Photo: courtesy of Estate of Susan Hiller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Emilie-Serri_AgroupofSyrianrefugeesstandinginfrontofaboatinasnowstorm\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Emilie-Serri_AgroupofSyrianrefugeesstandinginfrontofaboatinasnowstorm_07-EXTRA.jpg\")
Damascus Dreams<\/em>, video still, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/alManam_mutter_2017_06_26_22_12_04_061-1.jpg\")
Al-Manam (The Dream)<\/em>, video stills, 1987.
Photos: courtesy of Dunia Film & mec film<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/DerTraum1-min-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Mohammah-Malas_DerTraum2-min-EXTRA-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nDeep Sleep<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP_LT_67-EXTRA.jpg\")
Deep Sleep<\/em>, video still, 2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Fulton_Basma-Al-Sharif_DEEPSLEEP_LT_16-EXTRA.jpg\")
Deep Sleep<\/em>, video still, 2014.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n