Charmaine Li

Charmaine Li explores the porous border between dream and waking worlds through intuitive and collective writing. She examines what surrounds the text: the silences between sentences, the creative interstices sleeping between words. To substantiate the oneiric space, she records her dreams in a diary every morning, probes their relationship with the thoughts of artists and researchers from different disciplines, and holds participatory readings in which they may become a shared experience. Her collaborations are guided by different questions regarding dreams’ potential for resiliency, the sensations that persist after waking, and the importance of attending to what emerges from the subconscious.

During her residency, Li developed a meditative installation offering a reflection on the world of dreams in a context of climate change. Using a multisensory approach to writing and encounter, she began Starlight Asked Stone with a video poem that brings together fragments of responses collected during a group session she had held in Berlin, placed in dialogue with entries from her own dream diary. Sentences – both recited, almost in a whisper, and partially written, barely touched upon – are blended together. Composed of fabrics, stones, images, light, and diaphanous words, the accompanying installation floated in her studio like memories of a waking dream – one that permeates a still-asleep mind, one that is hard to remember. Li invited visitors to stay and inhabit the place for a moment, soaking it in.

Accessing a more-sensitive mode of knowledge that surfaces only during a paradoxical stage of sleep, Li challenges our relationship with dreams: how are they related to inner and outer worlds, and to a shared collective reality? Do they come from a place tucked away in the past or do they link us to the future? Do ecological upheavals affect the inner landscapes in which our dreams take place? Could greater attention to our thoughts open up other avenues of reflection and create new models for the world’s survival?