Parasomnia

Absence of dreams

What does it mean to abandon yourself to sleep in a society which considers it to be an inevitable illness? Patrícia Portela invites you to an installation of four rooms, which you walk through one by one. You pass a series of paintings, images that pass you by almost unnoticed. While listening to 1001 stories, you are enticed to fall asleep – or perhaps to wake up.

Portela based this work on the uncompleted essay On Sleeping, Waking and the Absence of Dreams (1890) by Acácio Nobre, and on his reflections on the research of two 19^th-century neuro-anatomists into the sleep of birds. Parasomnia promotes the ‘production of melatonin’, and the ‘appropriate vapours of somnolence for the induction of a regenerative sleep and lucid dreams’.

• Patrícia Portela is the author and theatre director of, among others, The Private Collection of Acácio Nobre, which she presented at Performatik11.