Embodying dreams and emotions in the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

As part of the interdisciplinary project Atlas of Dreams, I created a series of artistic maps, that both show the places where 400 dreamers recounted their memorable dreams and also depict the emotional impact of these narratives in the grid of cities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Atlas of Dreams aims at uncovering the emotional life of cities. I present, from my perspective as both a visual artist and an ethnographer, how the embodied art practices of dérive and the Surrealist techniques of frottage contributed to recreate the dream process, as well as to the creation of a multimodal ethnography.

Keywords:

• nightmares
• visual art
• dérive
• Surrealist
• reflexive ethnography
• artistic maps

Notes on contributor

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, PhD is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who creates installations that blur the line between ethnography and art in order to convey experiences of extraordinary nature and address issues of social justice. Her latest work, Atlas of Dreams, unveils the invisible presence of dreams in the urban context. She has received awards for her work from the Wing Luke Memorial Museum of Art, Saint John’s University, and the Ministry of Culture of Chile. She has been an artist in residence at California State University at Chico, de Young Museum of Art, the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, and Djerassi Artist Program.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Four hundred is the latest number of dreamers in this project. In an earlier publication, I listed 145 dreamers which were the number of participants then (see Degarrod 2017).

2 In an earlier article, I discuss the artistic creation of the maps (of the rest of the clusters of memorable dreams) (see Degarrod 2017).

3 In the Western pictorial tradition there has been two major approaches to the depiction of dreams. One is the actual depiction of the contents of the dream and was performed primarily by artists in the Medieval period who represented biblical instances in which the dreamer has some form of religious revelation; the other approach featured in the Renaissance, with an emphasis on the dreamer’s individual dreams (Bergez 2018).

4 Since the 1980s, Oakland has been consistently listed among the top homicide cities in the country. In the last decade, however the homicide number has declined.