Dreaming Americas

Dreaming Americas – an environmental performance created in APP’ART, a private appartment in Paris in 2012, upon the invitation of curator Sebastien Borghi, with special appearance of the work of Hans Gremmer The Mother Road

Dreaming Americas is based on the creation of a semi-real apartment space open for the length of two hours to both visitors and passersby. During those two hours, all are free to stroll across different rooms, enjoy drinks, snacks, read books, watch a video, chat, listen to a concert, assist some inhabitants perform their daily routine or watch a writer working at his vintage machine and ask him to read bits and pieces of his story.

Dreaming Americas is an attempt to create a space out of regular time-space frames, where any (American) dream can become reality.

« We are projected into a timeless and impersonal memory, into a space-time suspended between dreams and memories, into living images whose status we do not know. Daydreams, film stills, distant recollections, or projection spaces in a Second Life kind of style.
What does it matter, after all.

There is Manon, a distant cousin of Alice and Dorothy. There is a writer, lost among the pages of a manuscript cluttering his small studio in Manhattan. There is a solitary woman from Tucson, Arizona, and of course, the immortal James Dean, who died on September 30, 1955.
And there is music. A fake music box.

There is also that obsessive young couple, lingering forever with a black Minolta on the lost roads of California. A poor collage of eternal life. And then, the smell of popcorn—the smell of America, the land of ultimate freedom in the minds of the children from the other side of the Wall. Just as Chanel will forever remain the scent of refined elegance.

Books, postcards, words and ideas and feelings.
And then there is you, and us, entering this space that is neither entirely fictional nor completely real. A space truly inhabited by characters—but not necessarily the ones we are meeting today.
And to meet is to take one’s time. It is to take the time to spend time. In the end, there is nothing to do. Time passes. All on its own. »

with Claire Espinoza, Tomasz Obloj, Manon Maurios, Sylvain Riejou, Mara Patrie & Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz

special thanks to JC Grisard and Philippe Quesne

Images by Nadège Néchadi