The Sociability of SleepThe Sociability of Sleep is an interdisciplinary research-creation project exploring the epistemologies and equities of sleep. We are interested in both the everyday and the exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. In sleep, we all become radically vulnerable in a way that requires social forms of care: individuals are experts of their somatic experience, and yet access to the sleeping self relies on the perception of human and technological others. How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity—the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others—help us rethink and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself? From the cyclical rhythms of productivity and rest, to shiftwork to overwork; from racial and gendered inequities to cultural alterities; from the stigmatization and performance of fatigue to the medicalization of sleep; from the ubiquity of sleep to its the privacy and invisibility; from individual experiences of sleep and dreams to the normativity of the sleep industrial complex—these are some of the manifestations of the social lives of sleep.sociabilityofsleep.ca
doux soft clubdoux soft club is an artistic and curatorial collective reuniting the practices of duo Pénélope et Chloë, Mariane Stratis, and Marion Paquette. The four artists met while completing their B.A.s in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (2012). It is through numerous exchanges and a mutual desire to see their practices evolve together that doux soft club was founded in 2017. Moved by cohesion, they see the regrouping of their plural visions as an essential part of their process. The club is an adaptable structure that invites all members to collaborate in the sharing, exchange and interinfluence of ideas. doux soft club’s work has been seen in Canada in the context of solo exhibitions at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal, 2022), the Darling Foundry (Montréal, 2023), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2019), Verticale (Laval, 2021 and 2019), GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018) and in group exhibitions at the Campus de la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (2021), Musée Ambulant (Québec, 2021), Arprim (Montréal, 2020) and Puce N.5 (Saint-Armand, 2019). The collective was nominated for the Plein Sud Award (Longueuil, 2020) and has received a research, creation and exploration grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2020).
The collective is interested in an aesthetics of softness, which brings forward a rehabilitation of the senses through notions of care, empathy, and resilience. Doux-soft is understood by the artists as the capacity to be amazed by the banal. This capacity is closely tied to the contexts through which the works appear, and allow for a poetics of the everyday to emerge in their works. Their projects investigate, dialogue with, and take on a multiplicity of forms: exterior interventions, websites, artist books, exhibitions, and performances. In this way, their performative work allows them to animate the sculptural objects they create, revealing their sensorial and sensuous characters. These manipulations, documentations and exhibitions seek to transform the viewer’s experience through a series of slippages. By constantly revisiting each project’s potential, the club reflects on the polymorphic, lively and permutable aspects of their production. Through their process, a collective intelligence emerges, feeding their research and production: inter-influence, determine how something is influenced, copy and paste, throw a ball around, catch it, and throw it back. douxsoftclub.com@douxsoftclub
