Somniloquies

somniloquies
Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2017, audio-video, 73 minutes

A wild orgy, a mass drowning, a dwarf city for rent, a surgical operation that goes tragically awry, a baroque mansion for sale that doubles up as a torture chamber, a de-pressurized Experiment Hall that causes ladies’ fingernail polish to fly off their nails… such were the nocturnal dramas of the world’s most garrulous sleep-talker. An American lyricist who yearned for a career on Broadway, Dion McGregor dreamed out loud while his New York roommate recorded him over seven years in the 1960s. In somniloquies, McGregor’s nightly musings are coupled with images of sleeping nudes. A roving camera that moves indiscernibly from one contour and orifice to another, one body to another, one gender to another, one ethnicity to another, one animal to another. documenta 14