On the Subject of Dreams
THE ALCHEMY OF UNCONSCIOUS:
On the subject of Dreams
Flash Art Magazine, 2013
Secluded from the maze of Venice and the swarming pace of the Biennale, the building of Fondamenta delle Zattere ai Gesuati hides a white gondala from view at its foliage courtyard. Paved and shored up in 16th Century, the building is located in the quay of Zattere, one of the prominent loading dock with workshops, where Venetian gondolas have been crafted and repaired. This dreamy white gondola is the key to enter the accumulative work of Kata Mijatović.
In the adjacent corridor two films present the artist’s sleeping performances both in Venice and Zagreb, manifesting Mijatović’s 20 years long venture on detecting and mapping the unconscious through dreams. The white gondola appears in the film where she serenely sleeps and sails over Grand Canal. Her obsessive investigation on dreams blurs the fine line between her findings of the unconscious and the mundane acceptances of the realm of conscious. This obsession exceeds its limits and culminated to an archive of global unconscious by collecting dreams. Thereby, Mijatović invites the visitors to be a part of this archive by entering a cage in the Coal from the Unconscious: Zattere installation by writing and uploading the reminisces of dreams. As Branko Franceschi underlines in the catalogue, Dream Archive is in its substance a social sculpture and represents the final amalgamation of Mijatović’s artistic vision into the area of social consciousness, and a means of globally disseminating the information on the subconscious. This elevated massive iron cage, which is located in the center of a room, looks upon the multi-media compendium of Mijatović’s artworks based around the subject of dreams.
The pavilion merges the unremitting act of archiving with the tidal movement between conscious and unconscious which are on the surface simultaneously through this project. Witnessing an act of sleeping –even reading the dreams- pulls the audience towards a different consciousness zone through insight. On the other hand, despite the serene dignity of the act of sleeping, the dreams are the evidences of varied hidden desires, fears, passions, and oppressions. In Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with the stories of 55 dream-like cities, carrying female names. Due the course of the book, it becomes evident that he is actually describing only one city and it is Venice. In alike manner, Mijatović gathers all sorts of dreams along with the accumulative data derived from her previous works to construct a collective dream for freedom in her own artistic territory.