Emilio Fantin “Dreams”
7 March – 16 May 1999
Curated by Gabi Scardi
Cafétéria

<<That night I dreamed... » You lust have to put your ear close to the wall to hear the murmured narrative of a nighttime vision of adventures, encounters and journeys into the past and the future, beyond time. The language of dreams, like the language of art, encompasses the echoes of daytime life, but it also brings another, different reality to the surface. For Fantin, dreams are not only pauses separating one day from the next, they are also the signs of a life unfolding elsewhere, in a Community of Dreams, in a nocturnal world which exists in tandem with the tangible world. This other life is governed - like the daytime life - by rules and customs; in it people exchange messages, people do things and people meet up. In this way, the coincidences, connections and relationships of the day can be projected into the nighttime life, and vice versa.

The artist Emilio Fantin, born 1954, works in Bologna. Since 1989 he has been coming up with projects in which he is the director, but he does not execute the project. He is happier to act as a go-between. One of his early works, « Strappi », consists in using the complex strappo technique (used for removing old frescoes from walls), to appropriate graffitis, inscriptions, and other artists' imagery, thus calling into question the concept of the author. In his subsequent works, he does not so much exhibit something as consume and transform it. This is why, in exhibitions in museums and galleries, he brings in activities from outside the art world, the aim of which is to create new conditions in the relationship between the public and those working in the art world, between places dedicated to art and other venues.
For the project on view in the cafeteria, he called on people working at Le Magasin, who recorded a dream within a given period. He organized sessions to listen to the dreams so that coincidences, links and relationships would come to the fore, even though they were generated in the unforeseeable moment of the dream by different individuals.

The exhibition is supported by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Grenoble.

Biography
Emilio Fantin is born in 1954, he lives and works in Bologna.