NEW CIRCADIA: AN EXHIBITION FOR A CITY THAT DOESN'T SLEEP

Beyond Tradition | Erika Serodio

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The first time I went to New Circadia (Adventures in Mental Spelunking), it was a Tuesday. A friend and I fit our visit into a pocket of time during a busy week. I took advantage of being with someone who wasn’t studying museums like myself, and I suggested we bypass the exhibition text on the main floor and head straight to the installation downstairs. A few weeks later, I nervously asked one of the curators, Professor Richard Sommer, about the ideas and intentions behind the text that I had not taken the time to read. To my relief, Sommer explained that they did not want this exhibition to be pedagogical. The didactic part of the show was designed by the team of curators which included Richard Sommer, Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson of Pillow Culture, and Laura Miller. A recent Daniels graduate, Zainab Al-Rawi, helped with the research. According to Sommer, the text was intentionally separate from the installation because they didn’t want people to have to work for the experience.

How do you organize your time? Photo courtesy of Erika Serodio

New Circadia taps into our current cultural moment by cross-examining our never-ending push for productivity. The curatorial team set out to design a space for idling and mental decompression. Sleeping in the space, says Sommer, was not outside of the goal. “We’ve had faculty fall asleep in there.” But Sommer adds that there was a broader sense of ambitions. The space was designed for anyone to fall into a state of semi-unconscious, to be lulled into a dream state. However, the positive reaction from students who are using the space to rest on campus has not gone unnoticed. The team at Daniels made the choice to extend their hours during the most intense time of the year for students; they stayed open all night at the end of last semester.

One of the puzzles in designing a space for people to disconnect is addressing the inconspicuous and insidious ways in which our cell phones are tied to our waking life. The curatorial team carefully considered how to make this space tech-free without being draconian about it; they did not want to make a no-phone rule. They chose instead to take a laissez-faire approach, hoping that the space itself would inspire phone-free behaviour. In my experience this has worked quite well.

Dream Parliament. Photo courtesy of Erika Serodio

A wide range of events are set to compliment the space in the coming months. Last Thursday, Matthew Spellberg and David Leo Rice led a comfortably horizontal audience through An Exercise in the Democracy of Sleep. Through his talk about the history of sharing dreams and the benefits of dissecting this common experience, Spellberg made a case for reclaiming sleep in a society that tends to devalue it. Recorded dreams had been printed in large fonts and affixed to the walls of the cave-like installation. Some of those dreams were collected through Oneiroi, a dream-sharing project that operates in tandem with New Circadia. An audience member asked Spellberg what we know about controlling our dreams. His response was that we do not, conclusively, know very much, but we do know that talking about our dreams will make it more likely that we remember them. Spellberg told us that after tonight’s talk it was very likely that we would all remember our dreams tomorrow morning. Sure enough, for the first time in what felt like weeks, I woke the next morning from a vivid dream to the sound of my landlady roaring the snow blower outside my window.

New Circadia (Adventures in Mental Spelunking) runs from November 7, 2019 to April 30, 2020, and is free to attend.

The upcoming programming associated with New Circadia is not to be missed:

February 13, 2020 – Performance: Christine Sun Kim
February 25, 2020 – Lecture: Mark Kingwell, “Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface”
March 5, 2020 – Lecture: Franny Nudelman, "Activist Encampments and the Fight for Public Sleep"
March 13, 2020 – Performance: Beau Rhee
April 2, 2020 – Performance: Kay Turner, “Persephone’s Return/Persephone’s Revenge”