Sleep Twitch

Vasco Barata

02 June | 26 June, 2021

Works

Press release

The hours containing shape and form were spent in the house of dream1

Sleep twitch’, ‘sleep myoclonus’ or, more precisely, ‘hypnic jerks’ are involuntary contractions of the muscles that generally occur in the transition from the state of wakefulness to the state of sleep, in that intermittent zone of reason, and are usually associated with a sensation of alertness or fright.

Featuring a selection of recent works (some never before seen), the exhibition Sleep Twitchat Galeria Fonseca Macedo bears the imprint of this urgency – a restlessness, a signalling of discomfort, of something not quite right. An involuntary spasm which, like a seismograph, raises an alarm.

Both individually and in the dialogue established between them, the works in the gallery behave like elements of a narrative in which sleep/dream seems to be interrupted by moments of ‘suspension’:provisional houses, suspended artefacts, diffused images, a sky that is also the ground, a light from the depths.

The hope that each ‘violent’ interruption of this sleep reveals the memory of another present and another future.

Vasco Barata

1WALTER BENJAMIN
In ‘One-way Street and Other Writings’ translated by J.A. Underwood, Penguin Classics, London: 2009