Oneirai drawings

Linda Chionne’s project

Academic year

2025 - 2026

This project begins with an archive of dreams from a generation raised amid dense, hyper regulated imagery. It does not seek meaning within the dreams but instead follows the logic of the dream image: unstable, fragmented, off scale. The work merges Talbot’s photogenic drawing - a direct imprint without perspective - and the Surrealist rayograph, which unsettles objects and their meanings, with AI capable of generating the impossible. The result is a visual device that doesn’t depict dreams but echoes their structure: layered, ambiguous, suspended between matter and simulation.
The image becomes a trace of memory rather than presence, inhabiting the in between - the very space where dreams take shape.
 

The Searchlights is the second chapter of Ti vorrei dire, a three-year project developed in collaboration with Gallerie d'Italia - Torino, a part of Intesa Sanpaolo. The projects map out the urgencies of our time through the perspective of a new generation. Ecological and climate crises, dynamics of power and representation, identity, mental health, precarity, memory and narratives of the present run through the works, shaping a collective account that restores complexity to what is too often reduced to a label.

Curated by:
Carlotta Cattaneo, Daria Scolamacchia, Giulia Ticozzi
With teaching support from:
Luis Aniceto, Francesca Cirilli, Fabio Barile, Diego Fontana, Alessandra Foschi, Simona Taddeucci, Jacopo Loiodice, Céline Volonterio