Subconscious Areas (2013)

Ginan Seidl

Ginan Seidl, 2013
Ginan Seidl, 2013

Open your eyes, not sure of being awake or still asleep. A red blanket, white wall. Is this familiar to me? Where am I? Everything is blurred. When I open my eyes. I am in a hotel in China, I am in deserty place in Irak, where I have never been but it feels familiar, I was in the house of my father in Merida, Mexico, I am in jungle in some place I can´t remember. I am on the ocean, on a ship. I am in a house I don´t know. I am in an aeroplane it is dark outside, I am in the house of my uncle in Devon, England. I am in my old room, where I grew up in Berlin. It looks slightly different. Has it changed, was it a dream? Two seconds ago I was in hotel that changed every second to another building with different people, different surroundings, but still it remained the same hotel. I jump in time andspace. It is a dream but at the same time mirror of my movements in life. Hotels, strange environments, airports, nothing familiar, but the situation seems naturally. I don´t dream of home, of everyday life environments but still it is there in the images in my dreams mixing up with imaginated spaces with landscapes I have seen I guess somewhere. My dreamscapes follow me throughout the day, during the so called conscious part of my perception of life. I want to understand. Where do these images come from. Why do I create or use such strange places in my dreams. Of which places do other people in the countries I feel connected to, who are part of my cultural and familiar background, dream of? Do they distinguish realness and dream and if, how? What is the symbolic meaning of a space in a dream? I started a journey to three of the four countries where parts of my familiy live or used to live and looked for people answering my questions from their subjective perspective, telling me their dreams, their perspective on their social and geological spaces. And I started to capture what I see around them, based on their relations and my view, as a stranger an observer and at the same time participant of that environment, which already was or begins to be part of my stock of memory. A german psychologist and a mexican psychiatrist who both live in cities, an english performer and hag which lives in the countryside as well as in the city, a german and an english farmer from small villages, a mexican healer and a mexican Huichol who lived all their life in the desert, were the people I met and interviewed.In the work each one of them tells a dream that took place in a surrounding which seemed significant for them. For me it was strange to see that the dream contents seem to be similar to my dreams, to a lot of dreams I have heard of other people, that I have read in literature or that I found in scientific collections of experimental dream sciences. But the places and the objects in the dreams I collected and over all the way how they were narrated are speaking of the social and cultural background, of how these people relate their dreams to their reality, of what they see and perceive everyday and have seen over the years of their lives.I still couldn´t tell if a dream has a psychoanalytic value, if it is the mirror of our souls, if it can forecast things, if the subconsciousness doesn´t have concepts of time and space, if it tells lies or the truth, if it´s just an effigy of ìrealî life or only triggered by physical conditions, etc...., but I found that these narrations have a potential to get a different and very personal perspective on everyday life in a more and more globalised world, where religions, ways of thinking, knowledge mix up and create new and special ways of perceiving the local contexts in which one lives. I neither decided to show, nor to mention which people are telling a dream, to focus on the pure narration and on a visual level on the landscapes, architecture and spaces which form the framework of the everyday life of these people. The soundlayer and the second videolayer that shows an undefined person moving in an OFF space while doing abstract actions are my interpretation of the related dreams and the person behind it, which is at the same time representative for a human being as well as an unique person in its individual environment.The seven videopieces with its two separate videolayers are projected on an object, that has a mobile character. Thin tent-poles hold an opaque and an almost transparent cloth. From one side the images are almost blurred, from the other side they merge to one picture.The object implements the mobility of camping architecture. It is able to switch its position every moment, the visibility of the videos becomes volatile. Pack the tent, take it with you, put it up, put it down. The journey becomes more and more an abstract movement in space. And in my memory it is already like an impression that left behind the sun after closing my eyes.