Description
Nocturnalities: Bargaining Beyond Rest is an artistic research project that aims to contextualize rest, exhaustion, anxiety and precarity in cultural labour, knowledge production and intimate strategies of care in the art world through publication, online REST Archive and public programme. It looks at sleep, and consequently rest through the performative forms of work –highlighting their communal impact and temporal boundaries. What can we learn from the capitalist co-option of sleep and its biopolitical strategies? How does lack of rest contribute to our mythologisation of certainty? And can art institutions take a sabbatical from their cultural production?
Nocturnalities aims to re-position this thought within the urges that we experience as artists and art practitioners in the Netherlands. The project has been conceptualised and developed by an Amsterdam-based team: artist and researcher Andrea Knezović in further collaboration with editor and publisher Agata Bar().
By initiating Nocturnalities we brought the expertise of visual artists, thinkers, curators and Amsterdam-based policy makers to embrace the power of rest, self-care and regeneration. The project aims to bring together a discursive and creative dialogue between artists, institutions and art practitioners by creating a publication and an online archive that is a visual trance witnessing different voices regarding the topic within the local artistic ecologies. The project involved a broad group of professional visual artists and cultural workers, academics and thinkers as well as cultural institutions. Through their participation in the production of the project: by inviting them to contribute to the publication, online platform and public programme, we aimed to open opportunities for knowledge exchange concerning politics of rest and local working conditions, engaging in meetings and/or networking within the art world.
The project tackles the nature and rhythm of the current mentality of the artistic scene—reflecting the zeitgeist of this age’s socioeconomic and bio-political mechanism. Its initial intent is to unify the scattered voices of the art field and reach out in a dialogue that will ripple through different institutional and individual channels.
