'Daysleepers' by Anna Gramaccia at NAM Project, Milan

Gray outlines of dancing shadows become hazy through the fogged windows, and the glares of the night start to melt into one another. It’s time to close your eyelids, yield to the fattery of a welcoming sleep and let dreams bump into your drowsy, kissable smile. While the bothersome buzz of the waking city greets a new day, echoing around you. Noises down the road move into a whisper that the wind takes away, repeating the same strange words like the echo of a menacing litany. The experience of time is a fast moving target. It vanishes near the horizon as past dawns become the sunsets of the present. The longer we test our senses through fltered rather than frst-hand experience, the more our being in the world becomes ‘more vitreous than visceral’. The day comes to you asking questions whose answers have already been written, too unfocused in their message. A lot of what is behind the flaments of our thoughts remains hidden, needing to be found, like a thread of a woolen sweater that once pulled reveals its ground zero. There are moments that do not give yourself enough chance to realize how much time you spend - how much you challenge it - dragging yourself within four walls. Just one day, a week or maybe even a month, judging by the biting cold air you can breathe outside now. Only to the lure of the night is allowed the vanity of stitching the disjunctures, in a muffed, sleepless and soundless limping. Intimacy’s murmured fragilities become props for the stories that the night tells, darkness gives the permission to be present. Night renegotiates its essence as a private space, the last trusted heaven from an always more motionless world. It’s that time where many layers need to be removed and revealed and you can only do your best to keep them together and not let them fall to pieces. Like small fragments of thin frayed paper, thoughts soar in the air. Now you can smell them, touch them and - if you’re lucky enough - even see them for a moment. Look around you. You fnd yourself in a wide room with a rough grey foor. No windows. The walls are a blazing white, even more glowing under the ray of fickering light that runs along the ceiling. Three monochromatic small monoliths spread out in the middle of the space, discreetly inviting you to walk around them. Something disturbing runs through the skin on your fngers, in the eyes of your mind, a tingling stating its urge to exist. The pressure of desire for discovery secretly invites insomnia. And you can fnally dream, awake.