Bed Bugs

Bed bugs is a video installation exploring the shifting states of sleep, with a focus on the fragile threshold of dreaming. In sleep, the mind enters territories it would never be allowed to inhabit awake. Movements that would seem irrational, emotions that erupt without context, visions we cannot control — if these states occurred in daylight, we might be called unstable. The work asks: to what extent does dreaming make us strange to ourselves? Where does the line lie between unconscious freedom and madness?

The choreography traces the stages of sleep. Bodies move slowly, almost suspended, as if caught between becoming and dissolving. The video unfolds in such a reduced tempo that the viewer may drift between perceiving stillness and motion — mirroring the moment in sleep when reality blurs, and the question arises: am I here, or elsewhere?

Voices murmur, slightly unsettling, speaking to the discomfort of the dream realm — a world we do not choose, yet must pass through. The dancers, dressed in pale, ghost-like sleepwear, hover between innocence and haunting. Their figures appear through a semi-transparent sheet: one side vivid, the other soft and unclear. Like a dream, sharp when we inhabit it, fading to haze the moment we return to waking life.

Bed bugs inhabits the fragile space between vulnerability and escape, control and surrender, sanity and imagination. It lingers where the subconscious leaks into the world, revealing that dreaming is not rest, but another form of disturbance — a place where we learn how strange we really are.

Co-performer Ludovica Bragaglia

co-performer