Dreamtime X is a diary kept between March 2020 and March 2021, capturing the conditions of lockdown as experienced by the author. Articulated in the form of 100 short poetic entries, the publication veers across a set of ambivalent perspectives.
From emptiness, loneliness and uncertainty to glimpsing the emergence of non-capitalistic life, Dreamtime X brings readers into a labyrinth of possible exit. It is also marked by breakage and suspension, as the text wanders across the page, searching for ways to occupy the new state of confinement. As the author contends, it becomes necessary to write by way of absence. What comes forward is a weak theory of revolt, where the metaphoric figures of fog, delay, transmission, and dropped beats suggest a commitment to staying with the emptiness. Emptiness, and the closed down, emerge as potent interruptions by which to reconfigure, through a destituent position, the functions of the usual.
Brandon LaBelle is a
musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator, educator and editor based in Berlin.
His work, based on performance,
sound installation, recording and use of found sounds, focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017),
The Imaginary Republic (2014-19),
Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and
Surface Tension (1998-2002). LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges.
In 1995 he founded
Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing house supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought.
