Varvara Lozenko – Dreamers

www.lozenko.com and on Behance

“‘Dreamers’ is a project that focuses on the inner world of a person, and how it can be reintegrated into the outer world, by which I understand natural environment rather than the urban habitat. In our dreams we oftentimes find ourselves in strange environments, distant places, somewhere we have never really been to. On awakening, we have a feeling of having actually experienced something new, of having been somewhere. Sometimes the recollection of a dream is so lucid that the boundary between the reality and dream seems almost traversable.

In the recent decades humans have been living far more like machines than biological beings. Their daily routine and life in general has long ago been programmed and they are following the imposed ‘schedule’ without thinking of where the beaten rut is taking them. Apart from eating, having sex and reproducing they have lost all touch with nature: we are only biological because we are still eating and having sex, apart from which we are living extensions to our computers, ipads, cell-phones, cars, televisions, kitchen blenders, etc.

An ancient hunter felt akin to the animals he was hunting. Nature was sacred, prayers were said and rituals administered to thank and pacify it. And people felt they were part of it, hence for example native Americans’ names: the Wolf, the Deer, the Rainbow. Nenets, the nomadic people from the Yamal peninsular in the North of Russia, still have those names: there I met someone whose full name was the Seashell chief, Son of the Intolerable, Grandson of the Polar Bear, Grand-grandson of the Walrus.

Urban people have completely lost touch with nature. They can hardly imagine what it can be like to be a fish, or a bird, or a butterfly. So Nature, the little of it that is still there, tries to awaken us when we are asleep. In our dreams we awaken as a Bird, a Butterfly, a Fish, or the first Couple who had the honour of entering the immaculate world that God had put to their disposal. He didn’t do it for the world not to be disposed of, I suppose. This is the idea we are to awaken to, first in our dreams, then in reality…”