Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep at Agora Hydro-Québec
How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity – the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others – help us reimagine and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself?[1]
This is the question at the heart of the exhibition Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep, curated by Marianne Cloutier, Aleksandra Kaminska, and Alanna Thain, held at the Agora Hydro-Québec from 21 June – 13 July 2023.[2] The question emerged from The Sociability of Sleep, a two-year research-creation project that brought together an interdisciplinary team to think about the epistemologies and equities of sleep (https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/). Their interest is particularly timely when we consider that at least one-third of the population has troubled sleep. Insomnolence explores how our various ways of relating to sleep, and in particular the lack of sleep, give rise to a diverse range of ‘sleeper subjectivities’. For example, some of the pieces exhibited here engage with the sleepless nights of shift workers or with the labour of quantifying our sleep through apps. The objective of the exhibition is to foreground the social aspect of these sleeper subjectivities to resist the often individualising tendency of contemporary sleep discourse.
Discussions around the sleep crisis[3] acknowledge that sleep troubles are a common phenomenon, but their solutions can focus too narrowly on correcting an individual, either by changing their sleep habits or through medications. This limited focus on optimising sleep can in turn increase sleep anxiety and even lead to orthosomnia, the obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep supported by sleep tracker data. Insomnolence resists such normative understandings of the ‘right’ or ‘optimal’ sleep to affirm the radical diversity of sleep, slumber, and waking habits in a variety of social spaces. While the curators draw on Jonathan Crary’s diagnosis of the problem in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, their approach differs. Kaminska, Thain, and McLeod write:
We resist, however, [Crary’s] idea that sleep exists outside of the logics of capitalism as an ‘interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability’. Rather, we understand sleep as already under attack but whose vulnerability is a necessary quality of existence, one that can solicit care, intimacy, and risk as much as attract exploitation and harm.[4]
In the exhibition booklet, the curators write that sleep ‘isn’t just a necessity, but a practice and an art in itself: an ongoing ritual for recomposing our self and our world’.[5] The artworks exhibited here – and well-documented with photographs on the Insomnolence website – demonstrate this beautifully. Three thematic clusters stood out in particular: questions of labour in relation to sleep and insomnia, considerations around rest understood through questions of sustainability, and participatory environments that invite inclination and rest.
For Insomnolence, the Agora’s large exhibition hall was dimmed to a soft dusk blue. All but one of the eleven artworks in the exhibition were arranged as so many luminous islands around the darkened main hall (see Fig. 1). With its many beanbags, cushions, and other ‘slumberous forms’, the Agora turned into an oneiric playground for soft encounters with sleep and sleeplessness, for playful experiments with hypnagogic and hypnopompic threshold states.
Fig. 1: Insomnolence at Agora Hydro-Québec. Photograph by Toni Pape.
Upon entering, I was drawn to a mount of cushions directly across from the entrance. Next to the pile of pillows, there is a collection of materials that emerged over the two years of the project: non-fiction books on the topics of sleep and insomnia for visitors to peruse as well as two ‘abecedaries of sleep’, one written in English by Sandra Huber in the form of a booklet, and the other in French by Maude Trottier. The latter consisted of handmade index cards for each letter of the alphabet, each one explaining and exploring a keyword around the topic of sleep, such as Biorhythm, Nudity, Eyelid, and Valerian. The cards were placed in a small wooden box made for browsing. This area also included The Things that Make the Sleeper, an accordion book with a photographic archive of sleep-related objects collected by the SoS team, photographed and produced by Albertine Thunier and Michèle Barcena-Sougavinski. Giving visitors different modes of accessing the collective research-creation process that resulted in this exhibition, this entire arrival area, called Variations in Zzz, makes for a comfortable landing site that offers food for thought and a first opportunity to socialise with other visitors.
Fig. 2: The Things That Make The Sleeper by Albertine Thunier, Michèle Barcena-Sougavinski, and the SoS team; and The Abecedary of Sleep by Sandra Huber (English) and Maude Trottier (French).
Fig. 3: Books to consult in Variations in Zzz. Photograph by Paul Litherland. Courtesy of The Sociability of Sleep collective.
Among the cushions of Variations in Zzz, I found two stuffed pyjama pants with a tablet fitted into each of their waistbands. They look like two bottom halves of people topped off by a screen, languishing among the pillows. This is 1000+1 Dreams (2023), a two-channel video installation by Henry Tan and Ding Yun Huang. Through the screens and the attached headphones one can follow the late-night video conversations between the two artists who tried ‘to synchronize their dreams between Taiwan and Bangkok’.[6] These regular exchanges range from the mundane to the personal, showing the artists chatting away at some moments, reminiscing at others and, of course, sleeping. The images are often blurry close-ups that hover along the surfaces of the sleepers and their night-time surroundings like mattresses and bedsheets and pyjamas. The artists’ nocturnal ritual is one example of sleepy sociability that creates and conveys a touching intimacy. From the very beginning in the Variations in Zzz, visitors are invited to appreciate and practice the sociabilty of sleep.
Right by Variations in Zzz, a separating wall creates a small alcove showing Ilona Gaynor’s The Labour of Sleep (2023). Gaynor’s piece is an eight-hour point-of-view shot filmed from the perspective of a hotel cleaner. As I watched for a while, I followed the cleaner’s work routine as she steadily goes through the habitual motions of dusting household items, wiping surfaces, and vacuuming floors and carpets. Filmed with a GoPro, the first-person perspective is constrained by a faded binocular mask effect which gives the video a dreamlike quality. Combined with the cleaner’s steady economy of movement that comes from habit, the video highlights the labour that the hotel industry – as an industry of sleep – requires to produce the rest that is precisely not available to the worker. The piece’s entrancing perspective and quiet soundtrack, including the occasional hum of vacuum cleaners, also give me an aesthetic experience of the social tension around sleep that is at stake here: the laborious semi-wakefulness of the cleaner in an ominously-silent hotel being set up for the next night.
Other pieces address how sleep and its optimisation has become labour-intensive. Yiou Wang’s Morphai (2023) consists of two 60-inch screens placed directly next to each other on the floor. The right screen gives a top view of a sleeper in a black suit ornamented with neon green lines that glow in the dark; the left screen presents various renderings of motion capture data recorded during one of the sleeper’s performances. The renderings become a visually-abstract sleep avatar that animates the movements of a body in an altered state of consciousness. This abstract mode of sleep visualisation resists the labour of data collection and sleep regulation. Instead, the piece invites a speculative encounter with one’s sleeping self as intimately familiar yet unknowable.
Dayna McLeod’s In Dreams (2023) problematises the laborious performativity of sleep in a very different way that is both funny and scary. In Dreams is a two-channel video piece that invites the visitor to lie in a stylish white dentist’s chair and put on a pair of huge, fluffy, bright red headphones. Once the viewer is in place, they oversee the two screens installed at about two meters height. The headphones connect to the left screen and treat the visitor to McLeod’s video dream journal. Usually framed in close-up selfie, McLeod ‘wears’ TikTok filters as she describes her dreams, which range from exploding fountain pens full of white liquid to terrifying abortion bans in Ontario to surreal striptease battles in a dream cabaret in front of an audience of dolls. The visitor can browse back and forth through the different entries by means of a trackpad. The right screen shows a series of eerie animated stills which were created using AI image generators. For example, I was mesmerised by a dollhouse that has a robe swinging on a hanger in front of each window. McLeod’s dream journal breaks with optimising modes of self-performance around sleep as it turns the screen – a much-maligned enemy of proper good sleep – into a hilarious passageway into the world of her parasomnias. In Dreams is a surreal horror comedy that acknowledges the challenges of insomnia but also finds joy in the infinite creativity of our wayward sleeping minds. This sparks lively exchanges around In Dreams: groups gravitate towards the dentist’s chair even though – or perhaps because – only one person can recline and listen at a time. Here the content of dreams becomes discussable in a way that does not try to interpret their meaning but, rather, revels in the dream as a performance and in the unfathomable eccentricity of the nonconscious mind.
In Dreams also relates to the second sub-theme of the exhibition: Sustainable Rests. While the imposing dentist chair may contribute to the piece’s nightmarish feel, it is also repurposed from a functional dental office. In an effort to embrace the principles of slow movements, the curators of Insomnolence invited artists to repurpose existing materials and artworks. In various ways, the exhibition explores the new creative potentials that may rest in older objects waiting to be awakened. Matters of sustainable rest also come to the fore in Paul Litherland’s photograph Dead, which shows the artist asleep in a wood crate. The photograph was taken in the early 1990s and thus shows a past in which the artist imagines their ultimate future. Here sleep and death overlap as states of vulnerability in which the photographer gives up control over his appearance. The photograph rejoins Wang’s Morphai in acknowledging that imagining oneself in sleep or death necessarily requires a speculative approach. This impression is strengthened by the awareness that I was looking at this photograph ‘again’, thirty years after it was taken: I felt an eerie suspense, as I found myself placed in the middle of a long duration between the artwork’s creation and the final rest it invokes but has also managed to defer for over thirty years. At the same time, younger Litherland’s peaceful expression bathed in warm light ultimately affirms rest as a bodily necessity for creative work.
This becomes clearer through the photograph’s placement next to a ‘psychogeography of sleep’ assembled by Alanna Thain and Emma Gibb in response to Litherland’s photograph as part of the Sustainable Rest prompt to re-curate existing artworks (see Fig. 4). To the right of Dead I see a square map lit in the same warm light as younger Litherland. The map, arranged as a diamond with its corner pointing up and down, shows Marconi-Alexandra, a Montreal neighborhood that has been heavily gentrified over the past two decades (and is referred to as ‘Mile Ex’ in the lingo of real estate developers). The map itself is surrounded by two handfuls of Polaroids and a legend that further document this process. An accompanying interview with Litherland offers insight into the psychogeography of a changing neighborhood (this interview is how I knew that Litherland’s death is yet deferred). To wit, the influx of tech businesses like Microsoft and Ubisoft has not only resulted in the displacement of artist communities. Microsoft’s noisy rooftop ventilation system has also disrupted the sleep of nearby residents. In this way, Thain and Gibb’s psychogeography insightfully reframes Litherland’s photograph and engages with contentious claims on urban space, the precarity of urban (artist) communities and their sleep.
Fig. 4: Dead by Paul Litherland, accompanied by Alanna Thain and Emma Gibb’s psychogeography of sleep for the Montreal neighborhood Marconi-Alexandra. Photograph by Paul Litherland. Courtesy of The Sociability of Sleep collective.
At the far end of the exhibition hall, the visitor can find and enter a large area reserved for How to Stay Sleepy? (2023), a participatory environment composed of several works that remix and reimagine the installation bleu de lieu by the artist collective doux soft club and a previous one-day intervention also called How to Stay Sleepy, which the SoS collective made in December 2022 at Centre PHI in Montreal.[7] At Insomnolence, the majority of the space is occupied by bleu de lieu, which is doux soft club’s collection of a dozen or so soft blue objects in various geometric shapes and sizes. Reminiscent of gymnastic mattresses, bleu de lieu allows visitors to playfully improvise their own restful environment. I experimented with different round and angular shapes of the objects to create the perfect incline for comfortable recumbency. Some of the blue objects have holes in them, which allowed me to lie on my side without squishing my arm (a dream come true!).
This participatory installation is accompanied by Nik Forrest’s Score for Staying Sleepy. Forrest’s soundtrack is composed of very low frequency (VLF) recordings. The usually inaudible part of the sound spectrum reminds me that no sleep environment is ever fully silent. Here, tranquility does not arise from the absence of sound, but from the atmospheric resonance with things beyond my human sensorium. Together bleu de lieu and Score For Staying Sleepy create a sleep environment by creatively folding various materialities into each other instead of focusing on, say, the subtraction of disturbances and noise. This idea is further conveyed by kimura byol-lemoine’s digital image Ovaries Dream, which beautifully layers images of the napping artist Maïté Minh Tâm Jeannolin over a picture of Yayoi Kusama asleep in a landscape. As a whole, How to Stay Sleepy? asks its visitors to consider that sleep environments may require continuous reinvention – against the search for that one perfect mattress. It is a participatory environment that invites creative experiments with the somatics of sleep.
Three other pieces encourage the visitor to reflect on and seek rest in a sociable manner. fall(sss) (2023) is an installation by Yoojin Lee which consists of a three-channel video and a resting area with beanbags and lots of pillows. The three screens are installed next to each other at ground level, which pulled me into a beanbag – the video piece is best viewed from closer to the ground. The screen in the middle is white with a little set of three coordinated axes in the middle; there is a scribble that ceaselessly errs over the coordinates; on the left and right screens, videos of people in public spaces slowly falling into a resting position, sometimes alone surrounded by onlookers, sometimes in pairs where the two people gently fall into each other. These ‘fall(sss)’ are interspersed with intertitles that are read by a female speaker: ‘Is together contact? / Contracting to release. / Transition from one stage to the next.’ A low static pulse and occasional percussive sounds provide the sparse soundtrack. ‘I’m surprised when we fall together, my fall is so easy.’ Like the exhibition of which it is a part, this piece is an affirmation of public languor. The mutual support between the fallers inspires a joyful trust that there is a collective care for physical rest.
Untitled (2023), a two-channel video installation by Manon de Pauw and Pierre-Marc Ouellette, foregrounds that the sociability of sleep can be a strange experience, as sleep necessarily moves us away from our (self-)conscious self. In Untitled, two tablet screens are installed at eye level and placed on either side of a screen of silver foil hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Each of the two screens shows the somnolent movements of a dancer – Karina Champoux and Philippe Dépelteau respectively – in front of silver foil. As they bend into the silver foil and begin to crumple it, their reflection is distorted in myriad ways, opening the subjectivity of the sleeper to unseen possibilities. Due to the large silver foil screen, one must move away from the installation to see both screens at the same time, which creates further distortions that estrange and reflections that connect the two screens. The piece, the first in an ongoing series, acknowledges that somnolence fosters a vulnerable sociability in which we become unknown to ourselves. But it also suggests that this opening to self-difference holds the potential for new and soft modes of communing.
Fig. 5: The Lantern by the artist duo New Circadia (Natalie Fizer and Richard Sommer), Henry Tan, and Ding Yun Huang in collaboration with architecture students from the University of Toronto. Photograph by Toni Pape.
The visitor is invited into one such soft mode of somnolent gathering in The Lantern, a large installation made by the artist duo New Circadia (Natalie Fizer and Richard Sommer), Henry Tan, and Ding Yun Huang in collaboration with architecture students from the University of Toronto. This is the one piece that occupies a darkened mezzanine in a loft-like space above the main hall. Before entering, visitors are asked to take off their shoes. Inspired by the mythological figure of the Naga, The Lantern is a large sculptural installation that looks like a huge jellyfish floating in the middle of the room. Soft yellow lights glow in its translucent tentacles. On the ground below this ‘Lantern’ is a circle of cushioned felt blankets, which can comfortably host fifteen people. The felt cushions are strewn with storytelling ‘charms’. These charms are soft, sewn objects in various shapes – for example a hat, bucket, clock, or shovel – and they each contain a little speaker that softly plays dreams told in different languages and in front of evocative ambient soundscapes such as flowing water or a lively café. Visitors are invited to take one of these charms and rest on the felt cushions. One can also find a position far enough from the charms to let the soundscape fade to a soft background murmur. As the stories, ambient sounds, and other visitor’s whispers blend into each other, The Lantern provides a space for collective rest through this soothing mutter. The piece reminds me that many stories are told for dreaming; it induces a collective slumber full of possibility.
This tendency of Insomnolence was also confirmed by Radio Insomnia, an audio project for nocturnal listening by curator Anabelle Lacroix and artist Nicolas Montgermont. On 7 and 8 July 2023, between 9pm and 6pm, Radio Insomniabroadcast a talk show inspired by traditions of community and night-time radio. Their mission statement:
Insomniacs, we are listeners. Awake, we are listening rather than sleeping for the sake of productivity. Why loosen the grip of insomnia when we can tighten our listening? When wakefulness is accepted rather than endured, can night-time radio connect us as if we were lying shoulder to shoulder?[8]
At the Agora Hydro-Québec, Lacroix and Montgermont were certainly able to connect attendees into a community of listeners and create appreciation for live night-time radio. Altogether, Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep was a rich and insightful exhibition that stood out for the various ways in which it demystified sleep and sleep media. Through its diverse array of artworks, the exhibition acknowledged the significance of our diverse habits surrounding sleep and challenged normative conceptions of what constitutes proper sleep behaviour. While it resisted prescribing solutions for better sleep, the exhibition did offer valuable insights and experiments for fostering a more inclusive attitude towards the diverse ways in which people find or search for sleep. Rather than measure, quantify, and optimise my sleep, Insomnolence encouraged me to embrace the complexities and nuances of my own sleep experience. Indeed, looking back at it, I believe that Insomnolence has helped me to be more at peace with my own disorderly sleeping patterns. By decentering normative expectations of individuals’ sleep behavior, the exhibition also foregrounded the societal conditions and social dimension of sleep. Drawing attention to the considerable social inequalities around sleep and rest, Insomnolence successfully generated an urgent dialogue and fostered both solidarity and playfulness around our fundamental and shared need for rest.
Toni Pape (University of Amsterdam)
References
‘About’, Insomnolence. The Sociability of Sleep: https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/about-a-propos/ (accessed on 22 February 2024).
Crary, J. 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
De Cristofaro, D. ‘Writing the Sleep Crisis’, The Polyphony, 11 December 2020: https://thepolyphony.org/2020/12/11/writing-the-sleep-crisis/ (accessed on 24 April 2023).
Kaminska, A., McLeod, D., and Thain, A. ‘Introduction: The Sleeper’s Unrest’, Intermédialités, no. 41, Spring 2023: 1-20.
‘Works’, Insomnolence. The Sociability of Sleep: https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/works-oeuvres-en/ (accessed on 22 February 2024).
[1] https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/about-a-propos/.
[2] This exhibition took place in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka on lands which have long served as a site of meeting, exchange, and rest amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations.
[3] See e.g. De Cristofaro 2020. See also Kaminska & McLeod & Thain 2023, p. 1 (especially note 1).
[4] Kaminska & McLeod & Thain 2023, p. 10. The quote from 24/7 can be found in Crary 2013, pp. 10-11.
[5] https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/about-a-propos/.
[6] https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/insomnolence/works-oeuvres-en/.
[7] See https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/events/how-to-stay-sleepy/.