Intertwining and Boundaries of Realities

Author(s): Ioana Micluția / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Dreams, nightmares, and other peculiar interferences of conscient states fascinated and still intrigue humankind. Besides the mystery and misbeliefs attached to these physiological phenomena, huge explanations were developed especially by psychoanalytic or philosophical theories, providing the interpretations of the content of the oneiric states. There is a tremendous corpus of scientific testing and explorations, which enables the adequate and subtle identification, diagnoses, and remedies of the variety of parasomnias. The multidisciplinary approach is coined as somnology and the oneiric are framed within the phases of sleep. Even if there are noticeable advances regarding the formal aspects of dreams, parasomnias, the content of oneiric states still relies on self-reports, if the remembrance is kept vivid and untainted. A clarification of the differences between nightmares and night terrors seems to be suitable. The nightmare is recognized as an independent diagnosis by the DSM-5. To pick up a nightmarish sequence in filmography would be too easy, choosing an opposite: the Morenian perspective of a surplus reality during a trance scene of the outlaw prostitute Cabiria while being subject of a hypnosis show led by a charlatan, which feeds all desires, phantasms of love, marriage, romance (Nights of Cabiria, F. Fellini, 1957). But the later reality experience, that seems to reenact the former trance, turns into a living reality nightmare. The final Fellinian escape from this scene is strange and surprising, but not as the frightening awakening from a nightmare. Nevertheless, the oneiric phenomena remain fascinating probably due to their partly unveiled mystery.

Учителят по рисуване в Априловската гимназия, Габрово – Иван Захариев и неговите ученици (1929 – 1957 г.)

Author(s): Nela Nedeva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

This article showcases the author’s research on art teachers at the Gabrovo State Boys’ High School during the 19th and 20th centuries. The study focuses on the teachers who have received academic education in Russia and Western Europe. The aim is to show the high level of teaching and erudition of the teaching staff in the examined time period. As evidence, the author provides information about their students who have left permanent traces in the history of painting even beyond the borders of their country.

„Мащаби в локалното“: Витгенщайн, Лиотар и постмодерното, преоткрити в концептуално изкуство. (Част първа)

Author(s): Rossen Roussev / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

This text takes up various aspects of a conceptual art project titled “Scales in the Local” in relation to key ideas of postmodern philosophical thought. More particularly, the conceptual focus of the authors of the project on the local, elemental, and uniquely singular is juxtaposed with the shifting focus of postmodern culture from the universalist metanarratives of the Enlightenment to the particularity of the singular. The project, which was implemented by a team of artists with different approaches to it, is seen as addressing and inducing reflections about major issues and concerns of our time. The work of the different artists is analyzed, drawing upon thinkers who left highly significant marks on postmodern philosophical thinking, including Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Lyotard, and Foucault, among others. While the discussion of the participating works of art is inevitably arbitrary, its main purpose is to be a source of further reflections.

Въздействието на технологиите върху творческия процес

Author(s): Nurkan Nuf / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

Technology has become an integral part of our lives in today’s fast-paced, globally linked society. It has changed the way we talk to one other, get information, and engage with the world around us. The field of creativity is only one area that has been revolutionized by these technological advances. Beginning with the development of the written word and continuing with the advent of digital media, technology has continuously shaped and reimagined the creative process, spawning new means of artistic expression and broadening the scope of human imagination. This article examines the ever-changing relationship between visual arts, music, literature, and cinema on the one hand, and technology on the other hand, emphasizing the need for exercising restraint and moderation when using technology in the artistic process.

Критика на оригиналността

Author(s): Svetoslava Georgieva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 3/2023

This article is an attempt to examine the criticism, theory of art and culture affecting the views and resulting polemical issues in contemporary art concerning originality, modernity, and novelty since the 1980s through the lens of theorists, critics, and artists.

Popularity: A Factor in the Market Positioning of the Artist (Discussion)

Author(s): Ivan Stoyanov / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Popularity is a key variable for the performance of the cultural and creative market. It expresses the relationship between the artistic work and popularity among the real audience, demonstrating whether the artist is recognizable. In turn, when this magnitude is high, it makes the artist preferred and sought after. Popularity becomes important in the economic side of culture and arts. Achieving the desired levels happens by taking a group of measures. Devising a proper strategy depends on having an objective amount of information about popularity.

Орфей и ранното християнство: мозайката от Йерусалим

Author(s): Vanya Lozanova-Stancheva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2021

The spread and enforcement of Christianity were accompanied by a slow process of creating its own symbols in fine arts and architectural forms. To a large extent, this process was closely related to the traditional means of expression inherited from paganism. An interesting example in this regard is the composition “Orpheus Taming Wild Animals” on the Orpheus mosaic found in Jerusalem in 1901. The history of the figurative scheme goes back to the end of the Archaic and the beginning of the Classical Era. Eventually, it illustrates a sustainable literary tradition with extremely scarce details, devoid of a narrative. The religious concepts of this ancient Orphic tradition were probably integrated and absorbed by early Christianity through the mediation of the Christian Gnostic sects and preserved in a funeral context until the 6th century BC.

Иконостасните икони на параклиса „Св. Йоан Богослов“ в Рилския манастир. Хронология на създаване и атрибуция

Author(s): Miglena Prashkova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2021

The text clarifies the chronology of icon creation from the iconostasis of St. John the Theologian Chapel in the Rila Monastery and proposes a new hypothesis for the attribution of the images from the apostolic (Deisis) order to Yoan Ikonopisetz (John the Iconographer) from Samokov.

Dans l’ombilic du cauchemar

Author(s): Javier Jiménez León / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2023

In our field, we tend to hear and read about, and even to devote entire books, articles, and testimonies to the oneiric experience – generally associated with what Freud meant by the dream work – but how much analysis and reflection do we devote to the nightmare? Isn’t it, perhaps, another form of what we call the oneiric experience? What place for the nightmare – beyond Freud and Lacan, but not without them – in the clinical experience? This paper is accompanied by the fragmentary saying – is there another one? – of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Pascal Quignard, Artemidorus, Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the saying of some analysands who have passed through my office. By these means, I will articulate what in some cases has been interpreted as a failure and which constitutes, from my point of view, the triumph of all those parlêtres who let themselves be inhabited by what we would qualify as the demonic – thus recognizing themselves. In other words, I will approach what incubates, in the navel of the nightmare, through sex and death as figures of the real.

Nightmares and Jokes

Author(s): Sara Rodowicz-Ślusarczyk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The theme of the nightmare is not a very easy one to approach. Quiteobviously, we are dealing with something highly unpleasant, but what contributesto the challenge is also the aspect of experience – the experience of the nightmare,and this is implies something that is lived. Thinking about experience, trying to getsome knowledge out of it – some kind of knowledge about the worst – is already ameans of distancing oneself from it. I suppose one of the ways in which we coulddefine the distress proper to the nightmare is precisely that one cannot get out of it.And it is also what makes the vital need of a separation so urgent, the need expressedin awakening.

Ingmar Bergman et Véronique Vogler : Lit de parade, oiseaux maladifs et cauchemar

Author(s): Noemina Câmpean / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2023

The present article represents a psychoanalytic reading not only ofIngmar Bergmanʼs film The Hour of the Wolf/ Vargtimmen (1968), but also ofBergmanʼs personal hour of the wolf, related to an inner pain, to an atmosphericsilence and to the irreducible scar of anxiety. On the other hand, the article presentsthe expressionistic influences of the German school on the creation of the Swedishdirector, regarding the terror of the artist, the adventure of light and whiteness, thesomnambulism, the soul and its double – the shadow, and so on. The nightmare ofthe main character Johan Borg starts with his visit to the von Merkens family: themembers of this strange family can represent projections of his own psychoticreactions – cannibals, ghosts, vampires, living dead, parasites, spiders. In thiscontext, the bed where Johan meets his “perfect” lover, Veronica Vogler, integratesa binary topos of agony and raw sexuality, a pietà and also a lying-in state of thecorpse which allows the ovation and the consumption of the breath of the deceasedby the participants. Ultimately, the bed hides the dramatization and the voyeurismof the self.

Un instant d’innocence ou les instances du non-sens

Author(s): Ioana Ciovârnache / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2023

The impossibility of comprehension concerns not only the subject’s relation to the other, but it also extends between the subject and his past. Just likeFreud’s navel of the dream, in Mohssen Makhmalbaf’s film A Moment of Innocence(1996) the unravelling of the characters’ lives and the spinning of their phantasmaticperspectives start from the same point of radical lack of sense. The movie’s playbetween reality and fiction renders possible a shift from the violence of the past intrusion of real into the subject’s life to the temporized acknowledgement of the inconsistencies in his own discourse.

Incubus: The Nightmare Materialized. When Aggressiveness becomes Violence

Author(s): Cristian Bodea / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The paper explores the tension between aggressiveness and violence regarding the intentional pressure (Lacan). It gives an account on thephenomenological take on intentionality in favor of the idea that the subject-objectrelation is indispensable for the conscious being. Psychoanalysis goes further andshows that such a relation has also an unconscious element which is essentiallyaggressive and structural. In order that the aggressiveness does not become violence,a process of sublimation is needed. This paper demonstrates that in nightmare sucha process is deficient, having to do with the forbidden object. Consequently, thequestion of incest arises. The movie The Incubus (1982) is a good example of what happens when the limit between subject and object is pushed, and it shows what would happen if that limit was removed.

Un long fleuve tranquille ou l’histoire comme cauchemar : La croisière de Mircea Daneliuc

Author(s): Radu Țurcanu / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2023

There is a real and distinct connection between anxiety and nightmare, as it had been pointed out by both Freud and Lacan. To which Joyce seems to add:“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. Moreover, the dream canbe considered as having a kind of nightmarish kernel, in the same way in whichfantasy has a kind of comical twist, and science has its truth revealed as sciencefiction.The subject is first of all the subject of the unconscious, filled with guiltwhen faced with his destiny as crushing demand of the Other. It is only within thepsychoanalytic discourse that this feeling of guilt is deconstructed and reveals thehole out of which one can say “that no” to both castration and to this totalitariandemand of the Other, source of anxiety, and thus of nightmare, be it as history ingeneral or for the individual. Mircea Daneliuc brilliantly decodes this intricate link between history and nightmare in his film The Cruise (1981), which takes place in Ceaușescu’s Romania in the 1980s.

Night, Dream, Nightmare. An Oneiric Reading of Chekhov’s Seagull

Author(s): Călin Ciobotari / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The present study proposes a reinterpretation of Chekhovʼs play from the perspective of the relationship the characters have with the night, with sleep, with dreams and nightmares. A very complex oneiric web is created by Chekhov by means of several factors: certain disturbances of temporality, slowness of themovement of the characters, boredom as a background state, drowsiness, insomnia, forgetfulness, identity disorders and so on.

Petrov’s Flu as an Escape from Reality

Author(s): Marian Sorin Rădulescu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The mainstream repertoire in the cinemas is made up of either “escapist” stories (produced and directed at Hollywood) or, occasionally, of observational, realistic kitchen sink dramas (produced and directed in Europe, Romania included). Realism and fantasy (“the two sides of the same coin”, said Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky) rarely meet on screen, as they happily co-exist in the astonishing, non-linear, fictious works by Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, or Chinghiz Aitmatov, where the reader can hardly find any signposts between fantasy and reality. When they do, the screening of such and ambitious epic like Petrov’s Flu becomes a feast

Przestrzenie wytwarzania i wytwarzanie przestrzeni

Author(s): Jacek Gądecki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2022

This paper deals with Polish creative-workshop spaces. Its aim is to consider whether they can effectively function as third places, that is, as social spaces separated from the home and workplace. At the same time, it is also indicated that – being makerspaces – they themselves co-create the city. An additional goal of the paper is to redefine the concept of creativity in light of research on workshop spaces. This is important especially in the context of urban studies and the promotion of an entrepreneurial approach to cities. The text is based on the results of a quantitative-qualitative research project conducted in selected makerspaces, fab labs, and hackerspaces in Poland.

Selling the Scandinavian Ethos: Principal Marketing Strategies of Nordic Design Brands

Author(s): Anna Wiśnicka / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2022

This text presents and analyses the principal marketing strategies used by Danish, Swedish, and Finnish companies and describes the set of marketing messages characteristic of Scandinavian design brands. The most popular strategies involve geo-recognition, with sociolinguistic mechanisms that influence the names of companies and products and the self-description of brands. The contradictory issues of nobilitation and egalitarianism, which have a pivotal role in the advertising of specific products for different groups of recipients, are addressed. Co-branding, including image collaborations between brands operating in different sectors, and mass media influence (the leading tool of advertisement, through films, series, and TV commercials), are other strategies. Connections are established between design promotion and widely recognisable cultural phenomena, such as hygge or lagom. Analysis reveals that the main marketing strategies characteristic of the design brands of the North revolve around a multitude of connections to Scandinavian heritage and culture.

Stan rzeczy w „Stanie Rzeczy”. Z kuratorkami wystawy „Stan rzeczy”, Grażyną Bastek i Moniką Janisz, rozmawia Romuald Demidenko

Author(s): Romuald Demidenko,Grażyna Bastek,Monika Janisz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2022

Jak elity wymyśliły ludowość

Author(s): Piotr Korduba / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2022