UNTIL WE MEET
with Sara Giannini and Sam Keogh
Until we can breathe the same air, let’s meet in spaces that our lonelinesses can unfold.
I dreamt that I visited my friend Sam in an old house. Outside this house a baby was caught in the branches of a tree, upside down, contemplating with discontent the world they had just fallen into. The following day, I learnt about the tarot figure of the hanged man, who is attached head down to a tree branch. This figure embodies a conscious sacrifice for a bigger cause, a suspension in time, an acceptance of an uncomfortable situation. The baby on the other hand had not chosen to surrender; their agency is to come – so is ours at the outcome of this hallucinatory period.
Sam has been isolated in his childhood village for an indefinite period, due to his unpredictable lungs. After he heard about his recent appearance in some of his friends’ dreams – including this one – he made a point to travel through other people’s dreams, in a video warning everyone of his upcoming arrival. I also shared the image with Sara, with whom I had been reflecting on active imagination practices.
This opened an exchange, co-creating scenes and projecting ourselves in these evolving virtual spaces while trying to reach a state of lucid dreaming. With Sam it became a diptych, each of us continuing what the other started. It started with a vision of uncanny peace and resulted in an experience of invasions and negotiations of sensitivities; hints of actions without fixed trajectories, a play on complementary dynamics. With Sara the exchange consisted of sending a digital collage with a question, to which she responded with short poems in a continuous unrolling, until societal urges could no longer leave space for sublimated inner sanctums.
See the work > https://nothinggentlewillremain.rca.ac.uk/main/