The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish

Hours: Saturday, November 26, from 3–11pm, Sunday, November 27, from 4–8pm

What is a sense of self, when landscapes and beings exist in co-evolution and co-habitation? What manners have we developed to attune ourselves to the various untranslatable experiences and unknowable ways of being? How do we investigate if mountains dream of us as we do of them? If we know that the average human has between three and eight dreams per night, how many are the interspecies dreams that shape our world’s nights? Do fish dream of themselves? Do butterflies have lucid dreams? Is electric sheep what androids really dream of?

Investigating how magic, art, science and dreams constitute one another and manifest themselves across all beings, the festival The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish dwells in those spiritual, creative and scientific practices that invite us to re-evaluate how we share this planet with all creatures and life forms.

The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish investigates the role dreams play in our lives. Understanding dreams as both sleep-time experiences and as threshold zones in which the cogito and the oneiric coexist, the festival gathers architects, artists, historians, philosophers, musicians and scientists to share their knowledge and tell the stories that celebrate the entanglement between self, mind and planet.

The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish begins with a two-day gathering in Porto and will continue in London and online, via podcasts, videos and other releases through to early 2023.

Participants include architect Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio, philosopher Federico Campagna, psychologist Nicola S. Clayton, artist and writer Onome Ekeh, artist and performer Cru Encarnação, behavioural ecologist Alex Jordan, diabolical agency historian Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, artist and musician Nahum Mantra, vocal performer Hatis Noit, and artist and architect Rain Wu. Visual identity by Giles Round.

The festival includes a screening of films by artists Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, Rosalind Fowler, Derek Jarman, Dominique Knowles, Ben Rivers and Himali Singh Soin.

The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish is organised in collaboration with Serpentine’s General Ecology project. It is the fifth in the festival series, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, which thinks about intelligence, sentience and existence across more-than-human worlds. Previous editions have addressed animal, human and artificial consciousness, language and interspecies communication (Language, ZSL London Zoological Society, May 2018); interior multitude, swarming organisms, symbiosis and entanglements (We Have Never Been One, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, December 2018); plant sentience, intelligence, communication with the vegetal world and forms of eroticism, mysticism and healing (PLANTSEX and With Plants, Cinema Lumière / French Institute and EartH Hackney, April/May 2019); and the teeming, entangled life of the ground, land, soil and Earth (The Understory of the Understory, online at the specially created website themind.fish, designed by Giles Round, December 2020).

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish series is curated by Lucia Pietroiusti (Founder, General Ecology Project and Strategic Advisor, Ecology, Serpentine) and Filipa Ramos (Artistic Director, Galeria Municipal do Porto).
Editions 1-4 were co-curated and produced with Kostas Stasinopoulos (Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine) and Holly Shuttleworth (Producer).