The new commission builds on Koki Tanaka’s practice in what he termed “collective acts”— creating situations in which people come together to experience moments or actions in which the focus is placed on the relationality that arises between human beings in sharing uncertainties. Responding to tragedies such as the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the artist’s open-ended projects highlight humanity through modest acts that transgress ideological boundaries and languages. This live dusk til dawn event follows Tanaka’s itinerary that takes audiences by bus and on foot through acts of eating, dreaming, and recollecting, which, collectively performed, are further deconstructed with the help of experts in each field.

When we eat together, our bodies, in a state of digestion, can be seen as a dismantling of our subjectivities as we reconsider what is whole, stable and in our control. Lucid dreaming can allow for a form of collective awakening; for instance, from fantasies of the past, where the unconscious body recalls and repeats resistance. In returning to contested sites that have been paved over repeatedly throughout history, Tanaka urges us to both physically and mentally enter these tug-o-war spaces where monuments and bodies become sites of living political struggle. How might this cyclical impasse of struggles for power be overcome through collective acts of destabilization and realization, or, eating, talking, and dreaming together in public? What can we learn through art history, revisiting ourselves, and visiting sites that we do not perceive through nostalgia but by learning and relearning our agency within them? Over the course of the night, through exchanging experiences, the temporary company of roving participants attempt to arrive at mutual visions of the future with the help of archives as active repositories of possibilities we might hand over to later generations.

_{Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok with support from Japan Foundation, Bangkok.}