Dreams of a Sovereign Citizen
2016

Utopian visions, hopes for the future, dreams of solidarity, or of standing alone, withdrawn; organizational principles, creative instituting, formations of tribes and festivities, and the desire for togetherness, especially that which may unsettle or renew the insurrectionary drive at the heart of the imagination.

The project sets out to dialogue with questions of democratic crisis and the realities of loss, disenfranchisement, precarity, and insecurity shaping contemporary life. In response, the project unfolds as a series of Dreams – scenarios, actions, meditations, and material expressions produced on site and in places around the world. Over the course of the year (2016-17), a Dream Diary is developed, with each entry constructed as a material and performative event or exchange, taking guidance from a set of historical and cultural references (of past solidarities and resistances, of cultures of dissidence and hopeful imagining). These inform the particular events and scenarios, as well as the itinerary of the Diary, functioning as raw material for a general anarchic manifestation.

By traveling and working within a range of locations, encountering the textured socialities of particular situations, collaborating and exchanging with individuals and institutions, the project carries forward an overall desire to search for ways to act as a global citizen. What might this mean and through which kinds of activities can this be figured? From within the international circuits of contemporary cultural movement, and the related conditions of the temporary project, what forms of responsibility are required or fostered? Are there new types of allegiances and alliances – ethics – demanded from within conditions of culture today? The Dream Diary is aimed at drawing out a social imaginary that may root itself across borders, through hidden gestures that work to dream aloud, through self-organized meetings and gleaned resources, by testing out materials and creating situations that refer us to histories and narratives of “direct relationships”. In response to democratic crisis, and the project of redemocratization, I’m interested to collaborate on an anarchic theory – the ethos of a non-sovereign citizenry.

Developed as part of Synsmaskin, artistic research project, artistic research project, 2016-17