Frozen Dreams: Firewords

Frozen Dreams: Firewords

 

In Frozen Dreams: Firewords, I combined two concepts from my artistic exploration: Frozen Dreams and Reactivations. 

I did this by merging two recently created chapters.
Frozen Dreams, luminous voices in the night and Deserted Dreams which I both presented in January 2026 at Café Tissardmine, an artistic residency in the Moroccan Sahara.

In the mountain spaces of Stone Oven House (The House with the Oven) https://stoneovenhouse.com/ I used a disused old rustic building and a forest path, coordinating the two projects in a unique dreamlike path seizing the opportunity of the FireWords festival: Fuoco di Parole.

 

Frozen Dreams, Luminous Voices in the Night, first chapter of a work-in-progress, ambience-specific, audio-visual installation.
It is a project conceived and carried out during an artistic residency I did, together with photographer and videomaker Eugenio Pini, in the winter of 2023-2024 at the Spitsbergen Artists Center, in Longyearbyen, Svalbard Islands, Norway.

In a dark and silent space, voices, diffused by portable loudspeakers anchored to colourful flashing balloons, narrate their dreams: inner memories reactivated when heard. The project is inspired by Les Paroles Gelées (The Frozen Words), a section of the fourth book (1552) of François Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel, which narrates that at the edge of the frozen sea, in winter, there was a great and bloody battle. The shouts, the cries, the slashing, the clashing, the neighing and all the other frightful noises became frozen in the air. When the rigours of winter have passed, the serenity and temper of the good old days come to the fore, and so they melt and are heard. 

As part of the Sound Reactivations project, during the artist residency at Café Tissardmine, I created the audio-visual installation Deserted Dreams, in a house that had been abandoned and deserted for many years, in the tiny village of Tissardmine, in the Moroccan Sahara, not far from the Algerian border. Voices recorded over the years (already part of the Frozen Dreams and Thawing Dreams project) recount dreams in different languages: here they are broadcast from hidden loudspeakers, in the twilight of a lyric desert sunset.