NOAM TORAN
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Selected Publications/Texts

All the Mystery, and Fear, and Terror...   2022
Essays for Interwoven Magazine   2017
Deviations from the Script   2016
One That Got Away   2014
From the Meinong Jungle Tribune   2014
Counterfeit Horizons   2012
Darkitecture   2012
I Cling to Virtue   2011
Things Uncommon   2010
The World Ending Object   2010

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In Dreams I Walk with You
2013 Mixed media

Should I tell you that my room is walled up? In what way might I leave it?
Here is how {…} I have only to imagine a door, a door old and good,
like in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron latch and bolt.
There is no room so walled up that it will not open with such a trusty door,
if you have but the strength to insinuate it.

– Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 1934

Commissioned for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, In Dreams I Walk with You is a theatrical installation echoing the “Worker’s Theatre” of the early 20th century in Europe.

The production centres on the relationship between Mario Castelhano (1894–1940) and Manuel Rijo (1897–1974) – railworkers, militant anarchists, and syndicalist organisers – who shared most of their adult lives in exile or imprisonment. Set during the 1930’s in the notorious Tarrafal concentration camp on Cape Verde island, the play transitions from the at-once banal and terrifying affairs of prison life towards a series of desperate ‘escapes’ in which the prisoners mentally construct varying utopias to imaginatively travel to.

Drawing from historical archives and texts, the writings of Castelhano, Rijo and other interned anarchists, as well as literary texts by Manuel Puig, Bruno Schulz, and Ursula K. Le Guin, the work is accessed in the form of a written script and by an uninhabited, ‘haunted’ theatrical set, kept ‘alive’ through a programmed lighting and audio sequence which loops over and over, as if a technician had forgotten to turn off the power after a day of rehearsals.

At once a commemoration of the humanist values of political anarchism and a reflection on the poverty of contemporary political culture, the work is also a meditation on the problem of, but necessity for, the production of utopias.

In collaboration with Onkar Kular. Curated by Mariana Pestana. Script written with Patrick Langley. Soundtrack by Kelvin Brown. Graphic design by Koby Barhad. Set production with Nick Mortimer and Joseph Popper. Photographs by Delfino Legnani.














In Dreams I Walk with You (2013) – Onkar Kular and Noam Toran from Moving Image Group


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