For ECLIPSE, Trakal and Jack Hogan in collaboration with Maximilian Schmoetzer have created a new role-played dream scripting and enactment methodology titled Under the covers, the waves! It is directed by the two artists and enacted/performed by a group of invited participants who bring their own dreams, which are then scripted live through different exercises and tools to format very personal neuro patterns into hypogenic states that cast oceanic feelings through acts of proto-communism. Under the covers, the waves! aims to investigate the themes of group dynamics and the relational aspects of resistance through the act of collectivised dreaming.

The process-based performance to film work, which then finally rests in ECLIPSE as a video installation, is based on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical findings in tandem with Augusto Boal, The Theatre of the Oppressed and the participants’ own dream diaries and lab-like conversations on set. The duo have spent the last year creating workshops on how to form scripts of the unconscious that are then collectively acted to camera. The foundational structure from which this work is made always includes the Kuringa, a jester-archetype, the medium and the choir that sing incantations of the dreams through different perspectives, resulting in the creation of a mutable and peer-to-peer lead imprint of the original unconscious transmission.

Under the covers, the waves!, 2021
Cinematic installation, 75'06''
Courtesy of the artists
Commissioned and produced by the Athens Biennale
With the support of the Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen

Participants Berlin: Popo Fan, Steph Holl-Trieu, Alice Z Jones, Lena Kocutar, Esteban Rivera, Vanessa Sioufi, Virgil Taylor, Sara Wendt
Camera: Can Kurucu, Nicolas Mayer
Sound: Jochen Radke
Thank you: Very project space