Emilia Telese
Sleepwalking
15 March - 13 April 2003
visit Emilia's website at: www.emiliatelese.com/sleepwalking.html
Images from the Exhibition
Images from workshops
Essay - Sleepwalking and Recall : A psychological study, Luca Becherini, Faculty of Experimental Psychology, University of Florence
Acknowledgements
Sleepwalking was a live, video and sound installation that explored issues of sensory, physical and reflected memory through transposed experience. The exhibition included a number of elements including performance, video installation and digital sculpture.
Sleepwalking recovered and reconstructed the journey Telese’s father made to the New Forest shortly before his death in September 2001, a journey from which she was absent. It is a daughter’s attempt to recreate the intimacy of lost memories, to share the unshared, to celebrate and remember her father’s life. Sleepwalking was also an insight into the physical aspects and consequences of sleep, its sensory implications and its quality during illness. Emilia filmed herself whilst asleep at a number of locations in the New Forest, at various times of day, during her residency in September 2002.
Works featured in the exhibition included: Play, a digitally sculptured space where people will be able to participate in a game inspired by car journeys. The installation was influenced according to how the game is played. Sleep, a video environment exploring sleep and the search of the self, including footage filmed during Emilia Telese’s residency in the New Forest. Recall was an interactive installation with a live link to a web cam at ArtSway and Telese’s website, connected to a remote location where Telese will be sleeping on agreed days during the exhibition, according to the exact pattern of her father’s illness induced sleep.
Emilia Telese was in residence at ArtSway in September 2002 as part of the NavvyGate residency programme (funded by Arts Council England, South East, to support new work in new media). Lighthouse, Brighton, have also supported the production of this work.
Back to top
Exhibition Images
Gallery 1 showing PLAY and RECALL
Gallery 3 showing the 3D slide environment with images of ephermera
from Emilia's personal history
Gallery 2 showing a performance day with Luca Becherini monitoring Emilia's
sleep pattern during her 'live' sleep which is being broadcast into the gallery.
Back to top
Workshop Images
 |
 |
 |
Emilia leading a workshop with students from Southlands School
A "Little Dragons" workshop taking place in the gallery
Back to top
Sleepwalking and Recall : A psychological study
In the study of animals’ sleep, the safety of the sleeping place is considered an important parameter to determine the duration and frequency of sleep occurrences. In humans, such risk factors have been reduced, allowing them the capacity to develop a pleasant feeling connected to sleep.
To force sleep during daytime in an environment like a forest, which has become paradoxically unnatural for a human being, means exposing oneself to unusual stimuli, getting used to them in order to force a mainly involuntary state such as sleep, to go against our body’s normal reaction to danger, as well as to light, which influences our biological rhythms.
During Sleepwalking and Recall Emilia Telese tried to alter her normal sleep-alertness rhythm, imposing un-natural sleep on herself, in the attempt to recreate her father’s experience of being in a continuous alternating between alertness and sleep, while suffering of liver failure, during his trip to the New Forest. Alterations of the normal biological and hormonal rhythms are common symptoms of liver illnesses. Some studies showed a change in the secretion of Melatonin, usually distributed throughout daytime by the circadian daily biorhythm. Melatonin is still a rather mysterious hormone, associated to sleep because its secretion is suppressed by light and coincides with sleeplessness. Melatonin regulates hormonal balance and manages the seasonal and reproductive rhythms. It is normally released from the pineal gland during the night, but in liver patients it appears to be released throughout the day. High levels of this hormone provoke sleep imbalances and cause patients to sleep during the day. An excessive activity of the pineal gland is full of fascination: because of its unique structure, the philosopher Descartes thought it was the place where the soul resides.
During Sleepwalking, Emilia Telese constantly maintained her cerebral activity as similar as possible to the first phases of sleep. She was troubled by an anomalous environmental stimulation, therefore she had to raise her own sensorial thresholds, in order to concentrate on her memories to explore and re-elaborate emotional responses connected to her father.
In some cognitive theories, dreams are considered like products of "cleaning up" and "organising" tasks that are necessary to the brain for the correct functioning of memory. The recollection of emotionally intense memories represented a further obstacle to Emilia Telese’s forced sleep, opposing a state of unrest to the search for calm necessary to sleep, creating a hybrid condition between mourning and sleep, that generated a change in the management of emotions, a new psychological state in which the painful events in our lives co-exist with the need to live in a positive way.
Luca Becherini
Faculty of Experimental Psychology, University of Florence
The full version of this essay and related bibliography is available on www.emiliatelese.com
Acknowledgements
Many individuals and organisations assited in the development and resentation of this work: Nigel Oakley & Cambridge Neurotechnology Limited; Jeremy Harwood & PolyComp Electronic Display Systems; Mark Crane, Gabor Papp, Luca becherini, Tim Didymus; Lighthouse Media Centre, Brighton; Fabrica, Brighton; Paul Ackerley, Felicity Harvest and Phil Smith at Arts Council, South East; John Gillett, Vic, Dave, Andrew, Anna, Saj, Liz, Lisa and the gentleman selling books at Sway village jumble sale.
Back to top
Click here to return to Past Exhibitions menu.