The Reverie Project
“I believe that this is the greatest task of a bond between two people: that each one keeps the other’s solitude.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The Reverie project is an installation of video portraits made in a reception centre for migrants in Geneva by the Italian photographer Martina Bacigalupo and the Canadian academic and researcher Sharon Sliwinski.
With this work, Bacigalupo and Sliwinski question our mode of representation: do political needs justify the desire to make everything visible, even if it means violating human dignity? The authors claim the right of each individual to decide how to narrate his or her own experience, going as far as the so-called right to opacity supported by the Martinique theorist Edouard Glissant.
Instead of depicting people in extreme situations, the Reverie project offers a form of temporary refuge by inviting participants to spend five minutes alone with a camera in a quiet place where they can let their thoughts flow. Afterwards, the participants are invited to describe their experience. The project challenges the traditional division of roles between subject and object, by involving in the reverie space also community employees and volunteers, and even the authors themselves.
The project offers the opportunity for a regenerative retreat from the contemporary media environment and supports a form of solidarity based on shared vulnerability.
Date: 2018
Realized by : Martina Bacigalupo et Sharon Sliwinski
Duration : 4 mn 40
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