Visualizza La Biennale di Venezia - Arsenale in una mappa di dimensioni maggiori
In the lead up to the 55th Venice Biennial, Rossella Biscotti ran a dream workshop, which meet bi-weekly within the Women’s prison on Venice’s Giudecca Island. For over 6-months, Biscotti and the workshop’s participants—primarily a core group of inmates and some invited guests—recorded and shared their recent nighttime dreams.
For whatever reasons, many of the prisoners only held casual relations between one another before the workshop started; however, many of the girls began to voice common images, and themes during each session. To draw out these narratives further, Biscotti—who was also recording and sharing her own dreams—would often supply the group with references and techniques to aid recollection and assist storytelling. As these dynamics evolve, a new ground for intimate exchange was also developed and advanced. Selected and edited recordings of these dreams are represented through a sound piece, which is played twice a day within Biscotti’s installation.
Paralleling the collective character of the workshop and its resultant audio track, Biscotti chose to use the prison’s compost—comprised of pooled rubbish from the women’s cells, the prison kitchen, and its garden—as the raw material with which to sculpt the form and space of I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha (2013). Like the nature of workshop itself, the detainees transformed the compost into a kind of media, as their daily decisions on what to personally throw into the mix became a continual talking point.
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