Abstract
Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.
Highlights
Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity
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Key concepts suggested by the performance experiencing are discussed, and it is advocated that sleep appears to be in contrast with productivity in contemporary societies
Summary
The article comprises nine sections: first a personal account of the seven Places of the performance is presented, follows a brief exposition of sleep regarding social developments in a capitalised market; after that, it considers what senses may be awakened in each. For that Parasomnia utilizes audio-visual media that lays on and shows a fantasmatic dimension, mirrored in these resources and resonating with our human subjectivity—both in relation to oneself and to alterity. This piece incites our bodies to slow down the speed, to have a halt to a continuous consumption and positing sleep as a political antidote to capitalist assault. While the picture slowly moves, Portela, as a performer tells this narrative embedded in other stories; namely why the bottom missing part was cut out of the painting. Voice one hears is a Portuguese woman (refer to Figure 4)
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