Luca Ihns: forged in darkness

forged in darkness

Project description:

The project “forged in darkness” deals with the idea of dreamtracking and the notion of a a practice of collective dreaming.

It is an attempt to transfer the world of dreams into a spatial situation and thus make the intangible state of dreaming tangible. It explores the immaterial and social dimensions of dreaming and raises questions about potential dream networking and shared dream experiences. After all, humans spend a third of their lives asleep, with dreams, which account for around two hours per night, playing a significant role in our experience and understanding of the world. Sleep enables physical and neurological regeneration, during which the brain sorts experiences, processes emotions and anchors knowledge in long-term memory. Dreams are not only biologically relevant, but are also important for learning processes, psychotherapy and creative inspiration. Lucid dreaming is used by athletes and artists, for example, to practise techniques or promote creative ideas.

Philosophically, dreaming raises questions about reality, identity and logic, while in art and even politically it is used as resistance to capitalist norms of productivity. Despite these diverse meanings, dreams are often trivialized in everyday life. Methods such as sleep tracking are common, but dream tracking - capturing and understanding dreams - remains a challenge, as dreams are highly subjective and neurobiologically complex.

The project makes this potential of dreaming visible and places it in a discourse by spatially inviting people to be drawn into the spell of strange dream worlds. A wide range of dream documentations were captured on suspended bed sheets using various techniques. Banal, profound, funny dream experiences, but also nightmares can be read and heard on the sheets and flow together into an immersive archive of dreams. The project was installed in an empty bus during the P8's 2024 Kulturdose festival, where it created a surreal journey into the world of our absurd, fragmented, illogical and opaque dreams.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version) https://kulturdose.de/festival/programm.html

Date: 22./23.06.2024

Location: Kunst- und Kulturzentrum "Die Kulturdose", Schauenburgstraße 5, 76135 Karlsruhe

Supervisors: Prof. Constanze Fischbeck, Philipp Schell

Photos: Yuliana Mosheeva

Graphic design: Anouk Merceron and Lea Möscheid

Thanks to: Athina Chrisofakis, Klara Beck, Asimina Sideris, Lasse Peters, Mathilda Jipps