Performative reading, site-specific installation and full night artistic research event – from dusk till dawn, 2022
Duration: 12 hours (6 pm – 6 am)
Photo: Simao Bessa
“This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down.”
― Morrison, Toni. 1992. Jazz. New York: Knopf, p. 16.
Nocturnalities: Bargaining Beyond Rest, originally inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) and Yann Moulier Boutang’s Cognitive Capitalism (2004), is the ongoing project that explores the intersection between cultural production, cognitive capitalism, politics of sleep and its psycho-cultural implications. It looks at sleep and consequently rest through the performative forms of work – highlighting their communal impact, temporal boundaries and mythological heritage. The main mission of the project is to examine different labour, leisure and creative strategies of cultural individuals, creative industries and institutional systems inside the realms of 24/7 late capitalism. Within these scopes and further, we ask ourselves how we can predict the future by bringing it out of sleep. What can we learn from the capitalist co-option of sleep and its biopolitical strategies? What is the connection between sleep and the notion of certainty? How does lack of rest contribute to our mythologisation of certainty? And what kind of care systems and propositions can we establish for a sustainable future?
Nocturnalities ― a constellation continuously growing in its mission and trajectory―is a think-tank platform, artwork, and public programme that thinks along with artistic, discursive, innovative institutional and individual labour strategies throughout local and global cultural communities. The project continuously grows in its intentions and collaborations and hosts different institutional and individual partners such as Škuc Gallery , Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA &CEE Art Catalogue Archive, Jonathan Crary , Katja Praznik, Tia Čiček and others.