What happens in the aftermath of infinity? The Sociability of Sleep is collaborating with the Fondation Phi’s exhibition Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE and doux soft club’s bleu de lieu participatory installation for a day long exploration of this question: How to Stay Sleepy?
Again and again, we have encountered images of Kusama resting and sleeping in the world of her own work. For everyone, sleep is an everynight practice of meeting the edge of experience, in which we are all experts and always beginning again. Through her art, her techniques of repetition, and her explorations at the edge of the perceptual, the sensible and the real, Kusama provokes that threshold feeling of the fall into sleep, when the world shifts around us and anything becomes possible. Much of her work and her life has explored the question of how to make such experiences of intensity and uncertainty both liveable and shareable.
In How to Stay Sleepy, visitors will be invited to experiment with their own experiences at the edge of sleep, the hypnagogic state and the remix of dreams, imagination and the everyday. Guided by SoS’s team of expert artists, sleep scientists and fellow sleepers, we invite you to extend the edge of infinity as you step out of Kusama’s world. You choose how you wish to take part: through the Kusama sleep questionnaire, by recording your sleep rests and remixing the onsite soundscape, by napping alongside the action, opening up the infinite angles of sleep.
This work is made possible in part by the New Frontiers in Research Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Foundation Phi, Montréal,
465 Saint-Jean Street, Education Room (SS01)
Free · Reservations required
To participate in the “How to Stay Sleepy” event, please reserve a spot by contacting Daniel Fiset at dfiset@phi.ca.
The experience will also be accessible to people who have tickets to visit the Yayoi Kusama exhibition on December 10, 2022.