Throughout the process of constructing the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, its curatorial team, participating artists and guest authors send out letters that directly and indirectly reflect the development of the exhibition. Instead of a text, the artist Lydia Ourahmane sent us a video, Sophia’s dream, which somehow reflects on the way the bienal itself, as she said, “speaks so much about sound and wind and song”.

Shot in Frioul, an archipelago off the coast of Marseille, where she is currently based, Sophia’s dream is ethereal and ungraspable as most of Lydia’s work, and at the same time it seeks to be “urgent, unreserved, unedited, or poised in that spirit at least. As correspondence should always feel”.

dream by Sophia Al-Maria, harp by Lydia Ourahmane

Transcription

I had this funny dream the other night about humpback whales…they were going extinct and I was looking at a map and I was picking up an information from somewhere by these like… red lines in the map that showed where like the sonic frequencies like… really loud frequencies of a humpback’s song… were starting to come onto the land because they were trying to reach us from the deep, deep, deep sea. And it felt really real, like…it was… It felt true or something, it felt wobbly, I have like, kind of had sea legs…since.