Breathing Matter(s): Dreamover with Dion McGregor + Opening performance by OJOBOCA

silent green presents

SOFT PRISON
OJOBOCA (G 2025)
Performance
9 pm

Perhaps you find yourself in a situation where you have the sudden urge to perform, but no audience is available, and you feel trapped. SOFT PRISON, a work by OJOBOCA, is a collective performance of a single-user device in which a phosphorescent 35mm slide and a personalized soundtrack guide participants through a solitary choreography that makes them both the performer and the audience of their own selves.

Soft Prison – A Home Performance Kit was commissioned by the European Media Art Festival in 2021.

OJOBOCA is a Berlin-based artist duo formed by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy. Their work is rooted in an exploration of cinema as a social ritual and as a tool for generating collective experience. They call their practice Orrorism, which they define as a simulated method of inner and outer transformation.

Since 2010, OJOBOCA has created a series of experimental films, installations, and performances that have been screened at film festivals and art venues worldwide, among them the Museum of the Moving Image, ICA London, Wexner Center for the Arts, Österreichische Filmmuseum, Anthology Film Archives, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kunstverein München, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam and New York Film Festival.

Dreamover with Dion McGregor
Curated/selected by Steve Venright
Listening Session
10 pm until August 3, 10 am

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s somniloquies draws on the peculiar nocturnal sound recordings of an unconscious American songwriter who yearned in vain to make it on Broadway. Dion McGregor's greatest success came with Barbra Streisand’s song Where is the Wonder. But he is better known to posterity as the most garrulous sleeptalker in recorded history.

Struggling to survive in 1960s New York City, he would “couch surf” at friends’ apartments, including the actor Carleton Carpenter and the "grandfather of gay porn,” filmmaker Peter De Rome (in whose film Mumbo Jumbo he starred). When he moved in with his friend and fellow songwriter Mike Barr, Barr was astonished to find out what they already knew, that he would dream — out loud, and at length — in the wee hours of the morning. Over seven years, Barr would tiptoe into his living room where McGregor was still asleep on a tiny twin bed and record his somnolent stories. They were curious confabulations whose content was often outlandish and surreal, but whose structure was more coherent than dreams as we usually understand them. They were populated with existential quandaries, violent fights, invented languages and songs, riffs and puns, and black humor of the most unimaginable kind.

McGregor’s biographer and archivist, Toronto-based poet Steve Venright describes his dreams as “vividly macabre as Lautréamont, as decadently vicious as Sade, as comically absurd as Jarry, as sensorially deranged as Rimbaud, as eccentrically inventive as Roussel, and as charmingly splenetic as Baudelaire.” By turns insouciant and insolent, he would adopt multiple personas in a voice quite unlike his own.

When Barr played the recordings back to McGregor, he was astonished and ashamed in equal measure. He wondered if someone had slipped him a shot of LSD. “It’s like being famous for wetting your bed,” he would later say.

In 1964, Barr released a selection of them as The Dream World of Dion McGregor, as an LP from Decca Records and a book from Random House. An early fan, record producer Phil Millstein released a more salacious album in 1999, Dion McGregor Dreams Again. Since then, Venright has released two additional albums on his Torpor Vigil label, The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor, and Dreaming Like Mad with Dion McGregor.

In 1967 Barr moved to Los Angeles and McGregor soon followed him. Later, he and his partner Clement Brace moved to Oregon, where his anxieties seem to have deserted him, and his nocturnal emissions petered out, long before his death in 1994.

This night’s Dreamover with Dion McGregor is curated by Steve Venright and consists of a 12-hour selection of the extant, unpublished, and unheard recordings of Dion’s dreams from the 1960s. Marked both by tender empathy and vile misanthropy, they offer a cartography of our sleeping selves, when the brain is left to weave its yarns outside our daytime regime of consent and constraint. People are invited to come and spend the night at Silent Green, moving between sleep and nocturnal revery, and descending into the dream-world of Dion’s, and your own unconscious.

Saturday, August 2
Kuppelhalle
Start: 9 pm
Tickets