Faye Formisano

Faye Formisano, a textile design research artist and filmmaker, has transformed the Art & Science Gallery into “a laboratory haunted by dreams, science and our metamorphic powers”.

The exhibition

She offers us a journey into the mental space of a scientist she has invented: Roderick Norman, the founder of oneirogenetics, the science of the formation and storage of dreams in the bones containing our DNA. Here, the idea is to extract an unknown skeleton’s dreams. A scientific, dreamlike and minimalist fable: Roderick Norman is convinced that “Our bones contain all our species’ secrets.”

The installation revolves around three questions posed by the artist: how many dreams lie within me, how many genera lie within me, and how many species lie within me?

The film They Dream in My Bones, originally designed for virtual reality streaming, was adapted for the first room: instead of putting on a VR mask, we physically enter amongst the images via an installation composed of veils on which the artist has painted multiple images of the unknown skeleton. The video that plays at the end of the room is itself projected onto veils – fragile, mysterious images intimately linked by the weavings of the fabric.

In the second room the film Heaven in Matter, co-directed with Emanuele Coccia – a philosopher who specialises in the image and nature of living beings – speaks of the “weaving” of living beings, history and imagination, represented in the multiple metamorphoses of a map of the sky.