Our collective fascination with the meaning of dreams has produced an infinite catalogue of ways to understand them. We think they encode our deepest feelings, which we cannot name but which the skin feels and the mind carries. Sometimes we repress them in order to continue with our daily tasks, but we understand that they are a means to understand our emotional coordinates. How many times have you told someone close to you about your dreams in search of interpreting them? Have you ever turned your pillow over with the mission of interrupting a nightmare? Many dreams generate images so vivid, yet physically impossible, that it is difficult to shake the feeling that your body has witnessed the events produced by the mind at rest.

It is said that to dream of still water is a reflection of peace or an omen of good times to come, but if the water is murky and choppy, we would be facing an episode that demands that we make difficult decisions. It is said that to dream of death symbolises an intense desire for change. But the dreams which we must not dismiss are those that repeat themselves. And what does it mean to dream about your work? In your dreams, do you see yourself replicating the actions that you carry out when you work? For Jimena, this question triggered a series of conversations throughout 2022 with Venezuelan and Peruvian migrant women who work painting counterfeit trainer outsoles, in the informal shoe industry in the galleries of the Peru al Futuro shopping centre, located in the commercial area of Caquetá in Lima.

Caquetá, like many other markets and galleries in metropolitan cities, are spaces of continuous return for Jimena. These commercial quarters are providers of a wide variety of materials that Jimena uses in her work, as well as contexts that condense the rhythms, temporalities, aspirations, and demands of economic and social life in the city. After searching for cheap alternatives to linoleum during her years as a printmaking student, Jimena became acquainted with Caquetá, an area specialising in the shoe and handbag trade. Later, within the framework of other projects, she returned to Caquetá, focusing her attention on the hierarchy between materials understood as original and fake, such as leather and synthetic leather, or velvet and velveteen. In Awakening the Pulse, Jimena’s research is informed by the voices and testimonies of women who work with these materials.

Who are the subjects who work with the materials linked to the shoe trade? How and why do they work with these surfaces? How do they conceive of their relationship to their work? What do they seek, what do they yearn for, and how do these materials influence their lives? The first encounters between Jimena and the workers were marked by rough exchanges where they refused any dialogue beyond that directly related to orders or quotes for shoe outsoles. Gradually, in seeing Jimena return to her workshops and away from the watchful eyes of the stall owners, the workers became accustomed to her presence, making her part of their conversations. It is through these visits that a relationship of mutual trust and shared complicity is forged, recognising that both parties are working with common materials. This relationship allows Jimena to be part of conversations about work-related dreams, as well as to hear about memories of their hometowns, the stress caused by high production demands, their migrant journeys to Lima, and life projects.

Awakening the Pulse is an installation that takes the testimonies of these workers, the environments, designs, and materials that inform the universe of painting trainer outsoles as inspiration to create a dreamscape composed of sculptures, drawings, and a documentary video. As in dreams, where common sense and the natural order of things are suspended, Jimena subverts matter between objects to think about the fragility and instability of the structures that sustain the informal shoe trade. Plastic, rubber, metal, and a host of synthetic products abound in this exhibition. Jimena also introduces materials such as glass, alien to Perú al Futuro shopping centre, but used to inject these objects with the feeling of instability, precariousness, and the tiredness that the workers share in their labour experiences as migrants in Lima.

The shoe outsoles turned into large rubber towers refer to the uncertain geographies of the migratory journeys of the workers, but they also appear to be vestiges of the cult of hyper consumerism and the traces of labour precarity. It is under this economic horizon that the objects and testimonies that make up this installation are stripped bare and revealed as tired. The dreams of these workers are situated in a context in which overproduction is demanded above all else, where resting is a basic human need in peril, and where their labour, despite producing a unique object, is considered and remunerated with a value inferior to that of the object produced by a machine. They think of the dozens of orders to be completed, even in the most intimate and vulnerable moments of rest.

In this way, the sharing of dreams is configured as a powerful tool for forging connections between workers. The dreams in Awakening the Pulse become portals to think of their voices as a common chorus of shared desires and quests, fostering the idea of collective dreams as opposed to individual dreams or quests. This installation asks us to reconsider sleep and rest as everyday instances where possibilities of new utopias emerge for an environment that lives exhausted, from the recurring nightmares of the global age of capitalism.

Gisselle Girón Casas