Elena Ciobanu

I had the idea for this project approximately one year ago, but it took me more than seven months after I first started it- in February 2008- to find enough people that would get themselves involved in this. Most of them are friends, acquaintances, or just strangers I have met by spreading the word around to everyone I know.

Even if in some cases they were people that were close enough to myself, I don’t think I would have ever found out about these scars and their stories outside the given, premeditated context set by this project.

There are the kind of events people do not usually talk about, is that part of their personal history that remains hidden. This is the case when we talk about traumatic events but also for the insignificant little accidents that marked our existence.

That was exactly what interested me- to find the visual, tangible cues of the experiences of individuals- and I was prepared for the intrusive and some times very private character of the discussions I had with the people photographed.

In our conversations preceding the written texts, I have tried to insist upon recollecting as many details as possible from the period the incidents had happen, in a way seeking to individualize as much as possible the stories by addressing and recounting the wider context or particular sensations from that time.

I have also paid attention to the reaction of the people in front of the task of writing their own tale. Most of them tried to minimize as much as possible the importance of the incidents, even when they were talking about more tragic events and they were visibly affected , by displaying a sometimes sough-after detachment,even humorous act.

This is in a way a documentary assignment, an attempt to look at the people involved in the project through their recollected experiences, through a singled out event that marked accidently or not their existence, sometimes almost indistinguishably, other times more profoundly.

I almost never remember what I dream about when I am asleep. On the other hand, I have a friend that has an impressive amount of dreams. Most of them full of fantastic adventures and characters, showing attraction towards the impossible and the concealed.

I asked her to dream for me for a limited period of time. She consented to it and wrote down her dreams for one month. I have re-written them afterwards and agreed that I was to preserve their content, as well as the direction and morals of the imagined scenarios. However, I received the permission to intervene on the final texts that were intended for the public view. It was more an aesthetic and stylistic addition, not an alteration of the original dreams. I did this by rearranging slightly the phrase construction as well as the wording and by selecting passages from what she has initially wrote. After taking these steps, several texts were created resembling extracts from short stories, but the stories have never been actually put to paper themselves.

After that, I printed the cut out fictions and glued them into public places. Not any kind of public space, but those specific locations chosen by people to write anonymously their messages to the world or some of their private believes and concerns: the public toilets, the pubs and clubs, the old cannons by the castle, the plants in the streets and the benches in the public parks.

Under the general perception, dreams are one of the most intimate means of both self and the collective. They are regarded as a very common medium for evading some of the inherent filters applied to the individual. The idea of this project was to draw attention upon the private and not so private manifestations of the subjective voice, but also to break the uniformity of some of the messages found in the public areas by means of storytelling.