Emilio Fantin: Dreaming is Common to All
Logan Center
October 15 – November 15, 2021
Installation view, Logan Center
Emilio Fantin: Dreaming is Common to All invites the public to virtually upload narrations of their dreams to a dedicated website. These recorded dreams will be broadcast continuously as part of Emilio Fantin: Dreaming is Common to All, an audio intervention/installation at the Logan Center for the Arts (University of Chicago) and co-hosted at Comfort Station (Logan Square), Chicago.
Curated by Katherine Desjardins with Gabi Scardi (Milan), in collaboration with the Open Practice Committee, Comfort Station (an alternative space in Chicago dedicated to public programs led by the community, at the intersection of art and life), and the experimental music series, GATHER.
About Emilio Fantin
Emilio Fantin sets the conditions for dialectic exchange between differing forms of knowledge-- from mathematical logic, to agriculture, to the world of dreams. He investigates the relationship between plants, earth and other forms of life through the lens of biodynamics, making manifest their aesthetic character through implementation of artistic process.
His forays into the field of logic aim to illuminate boundaries between reason and intuition as fertile ground for provocative insight and overlap. Fantin operates from the conviction that flow, impulse, intention and movements of thought--albeit subjective, invisible, and immaterial--constitute the very real origin of concrete and manifest fact.
Fantin creates spaces and situations which facilitate a sharing of the non-geographic zones of sleep and the dream. In these zones, intense dynamics of exchange are generated--what Fantin refers to as "the social aspect of dreams", a search for those unique and hidden bonds that animate the life of a community.
Fantin's practice is particularly engaged with pedagogy as a form of dialogue, expressed as the Art of Conversation, alongside the concept of Invisible Community, in which the poetic and evocative aspects of social life become daily practice.
Since 2005, he is Professor of Architecture and Society at the University of Milan Polytechnic School of Architecture, where an early pedagogical experiment he co-founded developed into the experimental educational laboratory known as "Architecture and Art in Public Space". During this period, he established the "Public Art Observatory", a research facility for art in public spaces.
Fantin currently leads the “Dynamica” project, a nomadic study group dedicated to cross-disciplinary research into the relationship between differing areas of knowledge. He is co-founder of the Lu Cafausu project at the Lac o le Mon Foundation, a residency and center for artistic research in San Cesario di Lecce, Puglia. He has lectured widely, including the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), and has collaborated with the Free Home University, sponsored by the Musagetes Foundation, Ontario (2013/14).
Emilio Fantin has exhibited in major Italian and international exhibition venues including: Sensibile Comune GNAM, Galleria Nazionale Arte Moderna, Roma (2016); ASU Art Museum at Arizona State University (2013), Documenta 13 (2012); Frasq, International Festival of Performance, Paris (2011); Performa, New York, (2007); Venice Biennials (1993, 1999, 2008).