We commissioned artist, writer and editor Nadja Abt to respond to Bobbi Cameron’s ​‘for the first words of a dreamworld’ as part of our ONE WORK series.

Nadja Abt is an artist, writer and editor, based in Berlin and Vienna. Her practice combines writing with visual works. The dramaturgical starting point of her exhibitions are queer-feminist, fictional texts with references from the world of film and literature, which are combined in installations with painting, performances and collages.

Her texts have been published in artforum, frieze, Texte zur Kunst, PROVENCE, and Starship Magazine, among others. She regularly writes catalogue contributions for fellow artists and teaches at art academies. Her work is currently on view at Carlier/​Gebauer Gallery in Berlin and Kunst Raum Mitte in Berlin. Since 2024, Abt has taught at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Moved Souls

Bobbi Cameron is an artist with a practice rooted in Celtic shamanism. With for the first words of a dreamworld she shows us how these forms of knowledge can merge into a work which is both an intimate family portrait and a portal to the other side.*

This non-linear short film begins on a black screen with layered sounds. We hear birds chirping, a person humming, until the voice over (the filmmaker herself) recites lines by fiction writer Aurora Mattia that will be repeated many times throughout the film: ​“This is a book of doors. This is a book of tunnels. This is a switchboard. It is for passing through, for conjuring dimensions, for the first words of a dream world.” Announcing its threshold quality, the film begins to lay paths into another, spiritually charged world that we glimpse in short rhythmic images and abstract colour fragments. As spectators, we find ourselves in an otherworldly landscape of forest and coastline in saturated greens, dark slate stone and sparkling sea water, shot on 16mm film on the Slate Islands, off the west coast of Scotland, in 2024. We see a dancer (Aniela Piasecka) engaged in ritual-like movements. They are alone on a beach, and then in an empty, cosy looking living room with wooden walls and floors. Their gaze is focused, serious but open. Sometimes their eyes meet the camera directly, so that the viewer feels a part of their dance or ritual.

Apart from the dancer, some cows and a group of sheep are the only living creatures inhabiting the images, though there are many human and animal voices. One listens to repeated snippets of field recordings, rhythmic drum sounds and fragments of dialogue. From their answers, one can infer that two of the speakers are elderly people, they are in fact Bobbi’s own grandparents. Her grandfather suffers from dementia and, for the duration of this film, shares with the viewer the experience of a passage, between dream and reality.

for the first words of a dreamworld addresses all the senses: I see and hear, and I can also smell the wood of the interior, the forest, and the salty shore. Again and again, the camera captures the dancer’s hands conjuring or caressing the sea, or perhaps asking for forgiveness.

The film does not try to represent a mirror into the psychoanalytical unconscious but rather an invitation into a world of ritual, dance, and shamanism. Cameron’s approach to film brings to mind that of the American-Ukrainian filmmaker Maya Deren. As an experimental filmmaker and writer in the 1940s and 50s, Deren was interested in non-narrative storytelling created through experimenting with editing techniques of montage and dissolve. The influence of the Modern Dance scene in New York and her anthropologic research led to dance and ritualistic gesture becoming a red thread though her oeuvre. Like Deren, Cameron uses not only the magic of images themselves, but above all that of cinematic editing techniques to involve her viewers as part of the ritual. Layers of images and sounds rise and fall in a constant rhythmic movement, allowing us to not just watch a film but to experience it physically, in a near-trance state of mind. With precisely choreographed cuts, we are taken from the interior to the exterior and back again — a passage through time and space that is often associated with surrealist cinema where a dream world is represented through collaged imagery.

Like Deren, who disapproved of Freudian concepts, Cameron is not revealing her own unconscious mind to the spectator. Much rather, the director accompanies us through the door, into the tunnel, and allows the viewer to observe their own mental processes along the way. One is not merely watching a ritual, but actively participating in it, invited to experience a transformation of time and space, as Bobbi’s grandfather does in the process of his mental transformation. However, the film does not draw a direct parallel between the dream world and memory loss; rather, I see it as a suggestion to invite these in-between states of the mind into one‘s life. As dance historian Ute Holl so eloquently writes about Maya Deren in her essay Moving the Dancers’ Souls ​“The aim of film art is to engender movement in other minds, to move other souls. And others will be moved.”**

*See also Jennifer Higgie‘s book The Other Side. A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, London, 2023.
** Ute Holl, ​“Moving the Dancers’ Souls”, in: Bill Nichols (ed.), Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, Berkley and Los Angeles, 2001, p. 164.