Luiz Zerbini, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Dreaming Awake

Marres presents  Dreaming Awake, a tropical rainforest peeled back in layers. The exhibition is about the experience of touch caused by strong outside forces. The Amazon wilderness, moist, damp, sticky, deafening, breathtaking, is the most invasive form in which a landscape forces itself upon us. Once you’re inside, there is no escape. The pressure of the environment is so powerful and hypnotic that it propels people into a dreamstate. Dreaming Awake aims to bring that experience to the visitors of Marres.

The immersive project is developed by the Brazilian curator Luiza Mello and Marres director Valentijn Byvanck in collaboration with the artists Luiz Zerbini, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. The accompanying publication contains texts by Eduardo Kohn, Bruno Latour and  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Natureza espiritual da realidade [Spiritual Nature of Reality]: Luiz Zerbini
Luiz Zerbini (São Paulo, 1959) employs a rich and vibrant palette for a diverse range of subjects such as landscapes, urban panoramas and domestic scenes, as well as more obscure or even abstract works. A few years ago, he also started to show his sources outside painting. He created table-worlds composed of elements that he collects on his walks and travels, using them in his paintings: sand, bamboo, butterflies, leaves, corals, bricks, etc. For Dreaming Awake, he took his practice a step further: he transformed Marres’ ground floor into a forest-garden consisting of plants he has painted, others he is still going to paint, species chosen one by one to take part in a colorful total installation that is a living quasi-painting.

Promenade 2: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Through site-specific installations and environments that immerse visitors in light and sound, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Strasbourg, 1965) examines how spaces prompt memories and affect our moods and perceptions. After Chambres, her 1990’s series of minimally decorated rooms, González-Foerster has produced a series of dream-like interiors that contain references to film, literature and architecture. Presented in a version especially made for the space of Marres, Promenade 2 invites us to forget our spatial settings and experience the sound of a tropical rainstorm. The space is empty to focus the visitors’ attention entirely on the sound environment. The visitor’s body is encouraged to immerse itself and to be stimulated by the emergence of visions, recollections and dreams.

Phantom & Spiral Forest: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
For many years, Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977) has studied the Brazilian jungle through works that are focused on the powerful contrast between human perception and the intense reality offered by the jungle. In Marres, he presents two works produced in the tropical forest of Brazil’s Southwest, the Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s most rapidly disappearing ecosystems. The film Spiral Forest was shot with a hinged, gyroscope-like device in which an object can rotate 360 degrees while remaining upright. The body of the spectator is turned spinning in the continuous spiral of Spiral Forest and projected into it, entering the flow of the image in motion. In the second work, Phantom, the visitors use a virtual device to enter and move through a forest scanned in black and white.

Marres receives structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Municipality of Maastricht and the Province of Limburg.

Dreaming Awake is made possible with financial support by the BankGiroLoterij Fonds, VSBfonds and Mondriaan Fund.