ALI(E/A)NSI Conversations #6: Siestaria

Rest as a Collective Necessity

The ALI(E/A)NSI Conversations are part of the exhibition’s curatorial process: a way of connecting with participating artists through their practices, the works they propose in response to the exhibition, and their particular relationships to questions of alienation, belonging, coexistence and alliance.

For the sixth conversation, we speak with Siestaria, an artistic research project developed by Florencia Curci and Tatiana Heuman that explores listening at the threshold between waking and sleep.

Working through concerts for sleeping audiences, collective siestas, installations and radio pieces, Siestaria approaches rest as political and dreams as technology. The dream space becomes an acoustic refuge: involuntary, intimate and undisciplined.

For ALI(E/A)NSI, their work develops around Radio Pillow and the figure of the mother-pillow: a soft, animated presence that can become refuge, altar, vessel, transmitter or protective amulet. During our conversation, this soft architecture of rest also began to form an alliance with Pisitakun’s burned-book fragments, connecting protection, transmission and collective care across two different artistic practices.

1. What can Siestaria do that Florencia and Tatiana could not do separately? Where do your practices align, and where do they remain productively different?

Siestaria emerged as a space for exploration, a place to test out, above all, ways of doing.

Tired of the self-imposed and external pressure around our working processes in the field of art, we set out to create a shared space to try out how to do (some, not too many) things that we enjoy, consciously trying not to push ourselves into a place of suffering or stress. And how we might share it with others.

Neither of us was managing to do that on our own, so I think that’s Siestaria’s main contribution, something that, later on, I hope we’ve both carried back into our individual practices, to feel a bit calmer and more confident.

It’s on the practical, operational side that we perhaps complement each other most: Tatiana has a knack for making beautiful sounds with the computer and the shruti box, along with her interest in and dedication to somatic practices, while Flor brings a more conceptual eye and a certain technical geeky curiosity that leads us to explore different formats.

2. Who is socially permitted to rest, and whose rest is judged as laziness, failure or withdrawal? How does this inequality enter the work?

Productivity, efficiency, and constant action are valued far above pause, slowness, and contemplation. The pressure to always be one step ahead, to do more, produce more, means that this acceleration crushes certain bodies.

It is taken for granted that some bodies will bear more wear than others, without compensation. This is accepted as normal. That difference tends to correspond to coming from elsewhere, to being a migrant, to being racialised, to gender, and to having fewer economic resources, among other factors; most often, these conditions combine.

This happens to people, and it happens to the earth. Extractivism enriches only a few while exhausting the land itself. The planet’s rest is not being respected, and that disrespect grows more brutal every year.

This inequality enters the work as a condition. Radio Pillow does not resolve it; it insists on rest as a collective necessity and a political act. The invitation to lean on a cosy surface, to drift, to listen, to receive without producing, is not innocent. It is a small refusal. And it does not reach all bodies equally, which is itself part of what the work holds.

3. The radio guide deliberately does not guide toward anything. What happens when an artwork refuses productivity, direction and a clearly measurable outcome?

Nobody knows and that is the interesting part.

I think that not only us, but contemporary artistic practices in general, at least the interesting ones, have abandoned the logic of the project to become territories for questioning the given, even within the artistic processes themselves.

Making art will increasingly be about the creation of new legal forms and of other economies of use, ownership, and participation (quoting freely Raqs Media Collective).

And we believe that’s what it comes down to: we like our work to open up places for new people to come in, who will hopefully take away a good moment and perhaps some learning drawn from their own experience.

For that to happen, whoever approaches needs to be able to draw on adequate time and attention. That’s where the audio guides come in. While they don’t guide directly or consciously, they do generate that availability, which seems to us the only thing we can actually provide; the rest of the knowledge comes with each person. And the lovely part is exploring and sharing it.

4. The mother-pillow is simultaneously refuge, altar, scarecrow, vessel and transmitter. What kind of danger or disturbance is this soft figure protecting the dream space from?

We want these pillows to come alive, to become animated beings. We move them, make them speak, share them.

Our intention is for them to transform into a shelter, or perhaps amulets: places of reference to return to in moments of uncertainty and fear. The mother-pillow is a mother-ship, a protective idea that gives birth to its smaller pillows.

Without safety, without a space that holds us, it is very difficult to recover our strength. The soft figure protects the dream space from exactly this: the exhaustion of feeling uncontained.

5. You propose linking the mother-pillow to Pisitakun’s burned-book fragments. What makes this a meaningful artistic alliance rather than simply a thematic correspondence?

We link this work to Pisitakun’s burned-book fragments because both are acts of protection. We don’t want more book burnings.

The mother-pillow is a symbol of transmission, of propagating a collective force of rescue. It is a large ear and a large voice that repels destructive forces and activates alliances across difference: exchange, sharing, the protection of diversity and the strengthening of its bonds.

Linking to Pisitakun’s fragments, it is a similar gesture. The visitors who come to the exhibition are invited to give life to their own pillows, to honour their own spaces of rest, and to carry this idea forward: to make a pillow for a friend, to care for their sleep.

About Siestaria

Siestaria is an artistic research project exploring listening at the threshold between waking and sleep, developed by Florencia Curci and Tatiana Heuman. Working through concerts for sleeping audiences, collective siestas, installations, and radio pieces, they approach rest as political and dreams as technology. The dream space is an acoustic refuge: involuntary, intimate, undisciplined.

Florencia Curci is a sound and radio artist and curator, founder and director of the Sound Art Center of Argentina — CASo (2017–2024). Through radio experimentation and artistic research, she develops collective tools to challenge and resist dominant monoculture.

Tatiana Heuman works at the intersection of sound, media art, and somatic research. Her current projects revolve around the expansion of the sensory field.

siestaria.com
tatianaheuman.com