![\"Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Scardi_Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare_c-scaled.jpg\")
The Light Of Darkness<\/em>, video still from the installation Pulsazioni#1 \u0395CO<\/em>, Casa dei Risvegli, Bellaria Hospital, Bologna, 2019.
Photo: Carlo Favero, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Dreaming had been Fantin\u2019s main topic for years before he began working on Awakenings<\/em>. \u201cDreaming is common to all\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa paraphrase of Heraclitus\u2019s \u201cthinking is common to all\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ahas been his motto. In fact, Fantin\u2019s research and multi-disciplinary art practice have always proceeded hand in hand with considerations of the interrelationship between interiority and external agents, concrete facts and less tangible dimensions of life, and possibilities for social exploration. For decades, he has been concerned with the forms of the perceptible and the realms of immaterial existence. His position echoes interpretations of the concept of consciousness by the psychologists Carl Jung1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Arthur I. Miller, 137:<\/em> Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession<\/em> (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).<\/span> and James Hillman2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - James Hillman, L\u2019anima dei luoghi. Conversazione con Carlo Truppi <\/em>(Milan: Rizzoli, 2004).<\/span> and the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli,3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype: The Pauli\/Jung Letters, 1932\u200a<\/em>\u2013\u200a1958<\/em>, ed. C. A. Meier, trans. David Roscoe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).<\/span> who critique many of the assumptions that govern contemporary thinking. Since the 1990s, Fantin has focused on different states of consciousness, including waking, sleeping, and dreaming. His primary aim is to grasp the continuous flow of experience that occurs during waking life and also pervades our unconscious life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dreams, as an interplay of imagination, perception, and intuition, produce unexpected yet truthful scenarios that allow us to engage waking life differently.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n They also convey a collective dimension. In her book The Third Reich of Dreams<\/em> (1965), the Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt describes and analyzes the dreams of over seventy German citizens that she secretly collected in Berlin during the years of Hitler\u2019s rise.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933\u200a<\/em>\u2013\u200a1939<\/em>, trans. Adriane Gottwald (Aquarian Press, 1985).<\/span> Beradt theorizes that the dreams of different people who have gone through the same traumatic experience can constitute a testimony\u200a\u2014\u200aa kind of collective narrative focusing on the contradictions of a society in a specific historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beradt\u2019s book comes to mind in relation to Fantin\u2019s project, even though he is not exploring a situation of political and social control. Rather, he focuses on individuals in a situation that is rarely addressed: being forced to coexist not only with the traces of serious accidents that brought them close to death but with the trauma of having lived for a long time in an unconscious state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fantin is also interested in the collective dimension of dreams, and for years he has been organizing public sessions of sleeping and sharing dreams as part of his art practice. But above all, for him, focusing on dreams means questioning empirical reality, perceptual phenomena, and appearances; it means questioning the absolute evidence that we ascribe to the everyday world of waking life. To take seriously the transit that can take place in the realm of alternative states of consciousness is to re-evaluate the primacy we give to the concrete, the immediate, and the tangible, and to acknowledge that reality can be accessed through different perspectives and paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his work, which includes a wide variety of practices such as interventions, installations, videos, public gatherings, and other activities, Fantin aims to subtract vision from perceptions of reality that risk drastically flattening human experience. He is convinced that the world is endowed with a density, a depth, far greater than is conventionally accepted on the basis of oppositions such as real\/unreal, human\/non-human, waking life\/oneiric world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n His polyphonic installation R\u00eaves<\/em> (1999)\u2014one of his first works about dreams\u200a\u2014\u200abegan with an invitation to employees of Le Magasin\u200a\u2013\u200aNational Centre for Contemporary Art in Grenoble to record their dreams during the exhibition. These narratives were broadcast at low volume through tiny speakers camouflaged behind a white wall, and were indistinguishable from one another. In order to hear the recorded dreams, visitors had to press their ears against the wall. Words, like intimate whispers, reveal lives that seemingly unfold beyond the wall, in the world of the night. In this way the installation mediated and conveyed the knowledge and subjective experiences of what could be seen as the museum\u2019s community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Beradt, Fantin is drawn to the idea that different people can have similar dreams. He is also interested in the fact that in dreams personal relationships are often intertwined, people meet and then meet each other in reality, and the dead come back to life. At the time of R\u00eaves<\/em>, Fantin was already talking about \u201cspillovers\u2026 into daytime reality and interconnections between individuals in a community of dreamers.\u201d For instance, dreams can be heard coming from a tree trunk, dreams dreamt by Fantin himself or by participants in an intervention sleeping in a public space, or by students invited to sleep together in their classroom. Dreams are heard, written, shared in the most diverse situations: in natural, informal, or highly structured conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years, Fantin\u2019s interest in the interplay between listening and narration, and his research into the role of interiority in the transversality of transindividual states of consciousness, have led him to the liminal condition of being in a coma, an unknowable state in which life and death converge and the boundaries between them are blurred. More precisely, he is intrigued by the thoughts and visions that arise in the post-coma state. The origins of Awakenings<\/em> can be traced back to when he began recording first-hand accounts and reflections of former or current patients experiencing a post-coma condition. The recordings took place inside the Integratore<\/em> (2006), a room-size spatial device that sets the conditions for one-on-one encounters between individuals, which he had installed in the Casa dei Risvegli Luca De Nigris of the Bellaria Hospital in Bologna, a public rehabilitation facility dedicated to training and research on severe acquired cerebral lesions, with a particular focus on disorders of consciousness. The participants bear indelible signs of their accidents; for most of them, speaking requires strenuous effort. In their accounts they all speak of their post-coma condition by directly or indirectly referring to the moment their life dramatically changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Awakenings<\/em> installation consists of six videos in which each individual traces an inferential self-portrait. They do this in different ways, performing a story or displaying feelings. Some of them mumble\u200a\u2014\u200aone almost sings\u200a\u2014\u200aand others show emotion or severe suffering; some recount scenes from their previous lives or tell about the accident that led to the gap between their before and after. Others offer disconnected, fragmentary memories or leftover thoughts and reflections. A seventh video features a working metronome, with its repetitive cadence, evoking the inexorable passing of time that regulates life. The videos are highly emotional. Despite the necessarily subjective experience of suffering, we feel the flow of a powerful life force in their voices and stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one can express the tension between suffering and vitality with the communicative effectiveness of these individuals, not only because of their overt discomfort but because in one life they have lived several different lives, and within the restrictions of their new condition they have had to learn to search within themselves. If the fragility of existence has been revealed in all of them, the vital force they are capable of expressing is a conquest, however contradictory and paradoxical. For instance, in Simone, left a quadriplegic because of an attack, resentment emerges and anger remains. In Maria Pina there is radical immersion, a near relinquishing to evidence of a new and different situation, due to an event whose order and meaning escapes her. What remains, she says, is the desire to fly. Andrea\u2019s story is striking in its evocative force, triggered by the memory of her body as it was, its physicality, the vitality of desire. In Fabrizio\u2019s story it is the illusion of driving, in order to \u201covertake time,\u201d that separates him from life as it was: \u201cI dream of driving, just driving, only driving, to drive everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of these portraits suggest a before and an after: their subjects all contemplate the event that generated their current condition and its effects. In the words of all emerges the question of extraordinary living situations, of the relationship with the body, which is no longer something given but a non-definitive result of interaction between forces in struggle; and the theme of the caesura, of the arbitrariness of destiny, of an existence now definitively weighed down\u200a\u2014\u200ano longer mastered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Awakenings<\/em>, with its direct, explicit, urgent stories of post-coma subjects, is a strong stimulus to consider an overlooked dimension of reality, however harsh it may be. The same neglected dimension can be explored through dreams. Art and dreams both provide valuable ways of escaping reductionism, of overcoming a normative framework of thought, of becoming aware that the world is so much more alive and richer than what we repeatedly reduce it to with our simplistic categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contemporary art critic, curator, and author Gabi Scardi collaborates internationally with museums and institutions, curating exhibitions and public projects. She is director of the Socially Engaged Art course at Accademia Unidee, in Biella, Italy, and teaches contemporary art at several universities. She has published books and catalogues, and contributes essays and reviews to numerous publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
![\"Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Scardi_Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare_a-scaled.jpg\")
The Light Of Darkness<\/em>, video still from the installation Pulsazioni#1 ECO<\/em>, Casa dei Risvegli, Bellaria Hospital, Bologna, 2019.
Photo: Carlo Favero, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Emilio-Fantin\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Scardi_Emilio-Fantin_f-1-scaled.jpg\")
Dreaming is common to all<\/em>, workshop, Haute \u00e9cole d\u2019art et de design de Gen\u00e8ve, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Scardi_Emilio-Fantin_integratoreparticolare_b-scaled.jpg\")
The Light Of Darkness<\/em>, video still from the installation Pulsazioni#1 \u0395CO<\/em>, Casa dei Risvegli, Bellaria Hospital, Bologna, 2019.
Photo: Carlo Favero, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Emilio-Fantin\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Scardi_Emilio-Fantin_q-scaled.jpg\")
Prozac<\/em>, environmental and audio installation, Savignano sul Rubicone, 2009.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n