During December, interdisciplinary artist, writer and community organiser Julia Bavyka will be in-residence at Firstdraft developing new episodic dream-texts. A bed in the studio will be Bavyka’s companion during their residency, open to members of the public or to Firstdraft staff on request for a quality nap in exchange for a dream.
People are invited to visit Julia on-site on Saturday 11, Sunday 12, Monday 13 and Wednesday 15 December and share their dreams.
The advice from astrologists for 2021 is: embrace your deep desires and go for what you really want. 2021 is a year of change. Listen to yourself and follow your dreams.
What could this mean? You can follow instructions, guidelines, a strategic plan, advice, intuition – but your dreams? One night they might provide entertainment, a sweet memory of someone or something from the past, an unexpected orgasm, or an experience of flying above the ground. Another night you wake up with a sense of deep embarrassment and anxiety sweat on your bed linen at 5:30 am in the morning. Wild, dangerous, naive. There is no structure.
Both dreams and astrology are not considered in Western culture to be serious forms of knowledge production, and yet serious forms of knowledge do not provide any assurance in this moment. Whereas 2020 was experienced as loss, we know that 2021 takes courage; to follow dreams involves risk.
For the writers program, Julia Bavyka will write a series of dream-texts. Expanding on the dream as a storytelling and writing format is both an acknowledgement of imaginative, slippery paths of thinking and feeling, and a provocation against inherited and inhabited forms of (self) governmentality, like (self) censorship. The project takes its lead from a belief that the performative power of language can strengthen a sense of commonality and an appreciation for empathy, self care and memory.
The dream as a writing format has a political dimension because of the way that dreams express desire, fear and (suppressed) fantasies. At the same time, dreams are built upon multiple layers of lived experience, where places and people come together in unexpected ways. Dreams acknowledge the multiply voiced and never-fixed conditions of our existence. Dreams take you beyond the effects of systemic normalisation and assimilation and can remind you of who you are or are yet to become.
