Overnight Services, 2021–

1 & 2. From ACT I, SCENE 1: “PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR.”

3. From ACT I, SCENE 2: “RUNNING TO THE MOON.”

4. From ACT I, SCENE 3: “THE DRUMMER (DUMBA DRUM).”

5. FROM ACT II, SCENE 4: “GANNET.”

6. From ACT II, SCENE 6: “NDEBELE PATTERN.” “…drool the museum…”

Photographs courtesy of Gillian Fleischmann.

Dreaming is potentially the weirdest and most opaque department of body-maintenance work, integrating and reintegrating memory, dissolving trauma, and offering healing. We feel it afterwards as a Queerstate, only communicable by approximation, impossibly disinterested in taxonomy. Yet dreams are not the inverse of the actual, instead they neurologically register the weight and value of lived realities, storying embodiment, place and temporality otherwise. The dream — and applied collective dreamworking methods — offer us some shifty, content-specific, open and undone approaches to being together, making sense of images and texts, and imagining what institutional care could be.

Overnight Services is an ongoing collaboration between us (Abri de Swardt and me, Thulile Gamedze) and a shifting cast of actors — participants, spaces, images, scenes.

This serves as partial documentation of its first series of iterations, which took place at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, between 25 and 30 October 2021, within the exhibition Handle with Care curated by Gabi Ngcobo. The week encompassed three nighttime events, two of which incorporated museum sleep-ins. Overnight Services was here realised as part of the ‘Laboratory of Ideas,’ the public program of Handle with Care, curated by Sinethemba Twalo, and was co-ordinated by Gillian Fleischmann, with art handling by Tlotlo Lobelo.

Ideasthesia in Rehearsal: "Overnight Services" at the Javett Art Centre, 2021, Artthrob.