Looking for the Attic in the Cellar
From Tuesday (May 6th 2014), I will begin publishing a series of written pieces over at the website www.60pages.com. 60pages is an exploration in long-form journalism, set up by author and columnist Georg Diez, together with other collaborators from various mainstream media outlets such as Spiegel Online and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For 60pages, testing the limits of the journalistic format means opening it up to people with different backgrounds, and turning it into “a realtime thinking machine” in Diez’s words..
In the coming months I will revisit an idea I had thought about exploring on Slab a number of years ago, but for some reason hadn’t. Under the title “Looking for the Attic in the Cellar”, I will narrate a series of personal architectural encounters made whilst dreaming: an architecture of the subconscious.
The title of the series refers to Carl Gustav Jung’s comparison – made in Modern Man in Search of a Soul – in which the conscious being, hoping to act freely of their “autonomy of complexes”, behaves like a prudent man who, on hearing a suspicious noise coming from the cellar, runs to the attic instead to check for burglars. On finding none, he decides the noise was his imagination rather than dare investigate the cellar. Exploring the architecture of dream-sleep is a way of encountering the subconscious through the conscious act of writing; all without leaving the neat metaphor of Jung’s house.
I am not alone in this rather daunting endeavor. Each dream will be interpreted in an image created exclusively by the massively talented Michelle Phillips and Johannes Conrad of Studio YUKIKO. The one you’re seeing above is from the first installment: Cocktail Party in the Desert. Many thanks for taking part!
My thanks also go to Sandra Bartoli for hooking me up with 60pages. Her articles on the site can be found here.