Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, somniloquies, 2017, France/UK/USA, film still
The Parliament of Bodies screening of somniloquies (2017), Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France/UK/USA, 73 min., English
June 21: With presentation by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Volko Kamensky, and Jan Peters
In somniloquies, Véréna Paravel’s and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s camera moves over sleeping, unguarded naked bodies while a soundtrack relays therelates the sleep talk, nocturnal speculations, and orated dreams of Dion McGregor, a gay American songwriter whose hallucinatory, salacious, and sadistic dreams were recorded by his New York roommate over a seven-year period in the 1960s. A panoply of ghosts and demons—hilarious and hallucinatory, salacious and scurrilous, wicked and wise—merge while McGregor is taking his forty winks. His dreams traverse the broad spectrum of our emotions, offering a cartography of our sleeping selves, when the brain is left to weave its yarns outside our daytime regime of consent and constraint.
Volko Kamensky is a filmmaker, artist, and lecturer at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.
Jan Peters is a video artist, documentary filmmaker, and teacher at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.
The Parliament of Bodies is the Public Program of documenta 14. Its special film program adds another layer to the multifaceted experiments with new forms of sovereignty beyond the norm that take place within the spaces of the exhibition as well as in both cities, Athens and Kassel, in the form of a dissonant yet synchronic practices of heteroglossia and heterogeneity.
