Dreaming Is Common To All
by Emilio Fantin

This book gathers together, in separate chapters, various notes, reports, writings and images that have to do with research on the relationship between art and dreams. Reading them, certain aspects emerge: The intersubjective function of dreaming in a community through artistic experience. The dream as collective experience: dream and creative process, logic and dream, dream and immaterial reality. The ability to imagine as a process of construction of the group itself. Maieutics of dreams. The repercussions of dreams on waking reality and the interconnections between individuals and a community of dreamers. With writings by Lucia Lorenzi and Elisa Ottaviani Emilio Fantin creates the conditions for dialectic interaction between different types of knowledge. He generates spaces and situation in which he invites people to share in the non-geographical area of sleep and dreams, an area in which intense dynamics of exchange arise, with the aim of demonstrating what he calls “the social aspect of dreams,” in pursuit of those special, hidden ties that are activated in the life of a community. In his artistic research, Emilio Fantin pays particular attention to the pedagogical aspect; he focuses on dialogue, expressed as the Art of Conversation, and on the concept of Invisible Community, where the poetic and evocative aspects of social existence become everyday practice. Since 2005 he is a professor of Contemporary Art at the Department of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic. He has organized the Dynamica project, a nomadic study group for research on the relationship between different fields of knowledge. He took part, together with the other artists of the Lu Cafausu project, in the creation of the Lac o le Mon Foundation for Artistic Research. This book has been translated to English from Italian.