Raqs Media Collective, Escapement, 2009. Twenty-seven clocks, high gloss aluminium with LED lights, four flat-screen monitors, video and audio (looped), dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Raqs Media Collective and Frith Street Gallery, London.
In their 2014 essay “Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming?,” Raqs Media Collective warn against a “debilitating activist insomnia” depriving artists and intellectuals of the ability to dream. These exhausted figures voluntarily give themselves over (via social media, the news cycle, and the busywork of organizing) to sleep deprivation—“the worst, most damaging technique used by torturers.” I read Raqs’ overture to slumber shortly after it was published, while working at an art space in downtown Cairo. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had just been elected president and was consolidating his oppressive regime; in an adrenalized, dreamless frenzy, I was trying to conduct what I thought of as a dissentious “business as usual,” keeping the gallery open and running a sedulous program in spite of the atmosphere of impossibility. So how seductive it was to read of Raqs’ proposing sleep, not action, as the “gentlest possible refusal of capital’s rapacious claim on time and the human body.” Instead of performing grand acts of revolt—which are still subject to the same old capitalist valorizations of hard work, self-sacrifice, and striving for success—Raqs suggest we could just refuse to perform at all.
