Theme 2025 : Return to Dreamland
Return to Dreamland, From #CalmTok to Rest as Resistance
In 2025 following the progress of our reflection on play and activism, in the context of a hyper productive society, long conflicts, climate catastrophes, engulfing A.I, we want to take the risk, the counter intuitive move, the challenge to stay in bed, under the blanket, heads in the pillow. If new technologies infiltrate our beds to transform it into data to be mined, XR technologies, video games and virtual environments are also relevant media when delving into dreamworlds. This new edition wants to be another chapter of resistance where we self-organise to wander, dream, let our subconscious meet, invite our nightmares in...
The year program of Sickhouse and its main guest artists will be the leading process to develop the research and the selection for the festival.
* JANA ROMANOVA (https://janaromanova.com/)
“Shall these remain only dreams? we said. Shall we not bring these things into wakeful beings?” Ursula K. Le Guin in Changing planes : Social dreaming of the Frin.
Jana Romanova, LARP designer, is invited to design new playful experiences based on collective dreams, role-playing and dream-building experience that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination. At its core, the "DreamWalks" is about creating and inhabiting collective imaginary spaces—something akin to sharing a dream or a hallucination with others.
DreamWalk #1 : KristalBath - Sunday 9-03
DreamWalk #2 : Flying Field - Saturday 29-03
DreamWalk #3 : Walk in the ParQ - Thursday 24-04
DreamWalk #4 : to be announces
*SONDI (Link.tree)
“Wherever they stood it came, suddenly and simultaneously: refusal, refusal, refusal. And in a gust they collapsed into sleep.”
Sondi in Mbombo-Dream Echo.
In the second part of the year we are inviting Sondi to create an immersive set-up for her games “Mbombo-Dream Echo” and “Sleep On It”. The set-up/playground is meant to become a collective space for daydreaming, reinventing hybrid places of rest. Mbombo builds on years of research into the nature of rest and dreaming as radical forms of resistance against capital, colonial violence on the Black body. (concept formalised and put into embodied practice by Tricia Hersey in her Nap Ministry and her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.)
*JANNE SCHIMMEL (https://janneschimmel.com/)
“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
In the third part of the year Sickhouse is inviting Janne Schimmel to dive into nightmare references and hack a game device to navigate them, in hybrid ways mixing sensorial experience and digital storytelling. Curious about the ambiguous space, nightmares create for fantasy and pleasure.
Exhausted, Burned out, anxious, overwhelmed are now recurrent adjectives we associate with our daily life and our work environments. Technology coming to save us is now selling us “digital rest points’, ‘CalmTok’,’ Raw-dogging a flight’ ‘Pokemon Sleep app’ to track our sleep and for the best ‘Sleep Tourism’ hotels with VR lucid dreams experiences...
Rest is resistance but it is under attack, our escape is already trapped. Beyond the idea of healthiness, The Overkill wants to look at rest as an act of refusal, a protest against efficiency, productivity, or even this monetised idea of a better version of ourselves.