Sleep at night, live during the day: this alternation provides rhythm to most human existences. But, as Anabelle Lacroix’s “Freedom of Sleep” project acknowledges, the porosities that exist between day and night, between waking and sleeping, are multiple and cultural. In a time where sleep time is now counted more than ever, eaten away by the imperative of productivity, by the growing anxiety of our exhausted societies and by the increasing absence of darkness, a need has emerged: how to inhabit the night? And what spaces of subversion, real or imagined, remain open to us? Turning day into night, over-consuming every second, drives us, paradoxically, to insomnia – an inability to let go. If sleep is to become a right, living at night could constitute an alternative, a manner of reappropriating our fatigue to reconsider our standardized rhythms. This Station 19, entitled “La nuit. De l'insomnie au rêve éveillé: un espace-temps de subversion?” (“The Night, From Insomnia to waking dream: a space-time of subversion?”) is thus concerned with the cacophonous desynchronization of bodies and environments. It invites both to decentering – to the observation of the multiplicity of sleep/waking rhythms that constitute our cosmomorphical world – and to recentering – to the ability to listen attentively to the internal clock that is unique to each one of us, investing insomnia and the spacetime of the night as spaces of struggle that are as real and political as they are personal, unproductive and suboptimal. The night, a fertile terrain from which different states of consciousness emerge, becomes the place that favors the cohabitation of a plurality of beings. In the filmic universe of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose work is presented at the IAC from June to October 2021, bodies, elements and temporalities are transformed and merged, sheltered from the frontiers and hierarchies induced by daylight. The stark limit gives way to continuity and collective resonance. Obscurity is charged with a force that is dreamlike, political and metaphorical; darkness transforms our experience of the world and in this way allows us to imagine and redefine the conditions of our co-existence.

Méryll Ampe, One Night, 2021

Félicia Atkinson, A Forest Petrifies, 2021

Black Power Naps, Black Power Naps Maquette, 2021

Johanna Rocard, Batailles Nocturnes, 2021

Zoe Scoglio, Internal (Nocturnal) Dialogues, 2021

Tom Smith & Jon Watts, Waking Life: The Dreamwork Model, 2020

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Haiku, 2009

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Fireworks (Archives), 2014

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Blue, 2018