Alcestis is a figure in Greek mythology who enters the underworld then subsequently returns to the world of living – but remains in complete silence. It’s a silence echoed in artist Beatrice Gibson and director Nick Gordon’s new film, Dreaming Alcestis in which nobody speaks to each other. Instead, the protagonist couple dream of Alcestis guiding them through a journey across Europe as a backdrop of political turmoil and environmental disaster ensues.

Dreaming is a central thread throughout. We see the father asleep in the bedroom with his arm hanging off the bed, and in the living room the mother lays down on the plastic covered sofa to dream. Dreaming affords these parents a place in which to exist outside the confines of their waking lives and allows for an opening up of time and space. The film is narrated through dreaming, and it is through dreaming that we are aware of things happening elsewhere, of a world in crisis.

“Even though dream space represents the deepest depths of the self, it’s at the same time, universal,” Gibson tells me, before adding “I think I’m interested in it politically – not just aesthetically or formally – as a space that’s somehow acutely relevant, politically, right now. I’ve been interested in dreams for a while – they have featured in several of my films, people relating them to camera, or referencing them directly. The structure of the films is also dreamy: they’re edited associatively and are propelled by dream logic.”




“ This interest comes directly from a feminist literary tradition and the use of dreams in feminist writing and poetry. Alice Notley, one of my favourite poets, wrote a remarkable and beautiful essay on dreams. In it, she talks about how strange it is that the theory of origins conceived by men, or the male tradition, have always looked outwards for answers, toward science and philosophy when surely the answers are internal. It’s so strange, Notley says, that we rarely ask ourselves anything!”

“This idea of dreams being politically relevant now connects also to an ongoing interest I’ve had in the politics of emotion and feeling. I’m interested in making work that isn’t just narrative, but is also feeling – or based on feeling. In the current climate, of political social and economic turbulence, feeling and the present tense feel like the only tools we’ve got.”




It is true that the film seems to rest on the effect of feeling. The narrative isn’t straightforward, there isn’t a clear storyline running through. Instead, Dreaming Alcestis seems to expand into a kind of poetic feeling, which clings to its dream-like quality.

“Dreaming Alcestis is the first of my films that is completely wordless; they’re normally stuffed with words, from a very personal, autobiographic place but at the same time a totally constructed place,” says Gibson. “Dreaming Alcestisgoes one level deeper: from the personal realm to the unconscious and dream space. Another thing Alice Notley mentions in her dream essay is the idea that the male tradition has always been associated or concerned with a movement upwards. The enlightenment was about moving up away from the body towards logic and reason, argument, and discourse. Whereas, a more feminine tradition, for her, should be about going down, away from the mind and logic and reason towards those ‘less important spaces’; feelings, dreams or the unconscious, places that haven’t traditionally been given space in public or political life.”

There is also something interesting about how the film is presented. The moving images physically enter the space of the gallery, seeping onto the floors and the walls, engulfing the viewer in an immersive experience – as if the viewer is also entering the dream world. To create this effect, Gibson used a holographic gauze which refracts the film. Here, Gibson creates a beautiful synergy; by using holographic gauze, she makes a physical manifestation of Alcestis, who, at the beginning of the film is described as holographic. “It was a very fun experience for me, trying to think beyond the screen – I’ve mostly made single channel works, installed in quite a straightforward way” says Gibson tells me, adding, “with this work I ventured somewhere else and I think the holographic dimension really adds to the experience of it – you get to actually dream alongside the dreamers.”

Gibson explains that the idea for the holographic came from Alcestis herself: “We always conceived of her as being somehow summoned by the people dreaming, as a kind of Lynchian apparition – or the inverse, that it’s in fact her dreaming them. The question was then, what kind of material can we use, to manifest that feeling physically in the space?” With the installation designer, Sue MacDiarmid, Gibson deliberately misused the holographic material: “Normally, something floating in space would come towards you, but we actually back-projected the image instead of front-projection, so instead of creating a holographic 3D figure, the film is pushed out through the screen, projected onto the floor and onto the walls.”



The physical space of the gallery brings to mind a domestic or interior space. Within the film, the domestic is somewhat unfixed, the family’s travels across Europe are echoed in their physical space. The home, which is both functional (a place for the couple to sleep, for the children to play) and non-functional (the boxes of things, the toilet laying on the floor on its side, the sheets of plastic covering the furniture) becomes a liminal or transitory place – also reflecting the liminality of dreams.

“It was bang in the middle of the pandemic, and Nick and I were thinking about Alcestis. One of things that moved us both was how she flies in the face of her own fear to journey into the underworld. She goes and touches death and returns to tell the tale. We were trapped, like everyone, in our home, we looked at each other and thought, ‘let’s use her as an alibi to test our own fear, let’s follow her and see what happens. Let’s get in the car and just move.’ The film documents this slightly mad decision to go looking for her and we are quite literally in this transitory space, having just moved from one country to another.”

“We arrived in Palermo – a much more Mediterranean than Italian place – which is to say nearer Tunisia than Naples – and thought ‘right, well we can’t just arrive here, from the North, make a film, coloniser or extraction style. We had to take it slowly. So we decided to stay, to embrace slowness. We put our kids in school and stayed.”

“The flat you see in the film is an apartment we were about to move into. The fact that it’s an empty space about to be inhabited adds to the feeling of precarity. There is also a feeling of transitioning, and of the potential of transformation, because nothing in the space is fixed. The feeling of precarity or instability in the film reflected or came out of the reality of our life at the time, the instability of our lives when making the film.”




Alcestis as the guiding figure in the film acts like an anchor for the two dreaming parents. Even through silence and physical absence, she becomes a narrative device to make sense of the chaos and strangeness of the world outside. Gibson explains, “I’m endlessly fascinated by female heroines doing things they shouldn’t or haven’t before – Alcestis was the first female mortal in Greek mythology to venture into the underworld. She is a completely open-ended character: she forsakes her husband and children, goes into the underworld, touches death and returns to tell the tale. She knows the thing we all desperately want to know, the secret to the afterlife, she has been there, seen it. And when she returns, she says nothing.”

“Her silence is a completely blank slate you can project anything onto. Despite not saying anything, or rather because she says nothing, she somehow holds the key to death, or how to die. In this moment, in which everything around us is dying, she’s the perfect teacher. She can teach how to die and once we know how to die, we might understand how to live. Death is a potentially transformative moment.”

“Most of the films I’ve seen about dreams – Hollywood films – try to show dreams. It’s always kind of hammy. We didn’t want to show what was being dreamt but explore the form of dreams, to represent what it’s actually like to be dreaming. The film is all sound: there are very surreal sounds that get interrupted, almost as if the person is waking up. You hear the sounds of the street outside and the sounds of the dream. These two parallel tracks knock up against and interrupt each other.”

As a way to create structural narratives, the film makes use of intense, overlapping soundscapes that seek to merge interiority and exteriority. Events occur through sound rather than visuals. The dreamers dream of elsewhere, while being physically rooted in their homes. Dreaming Alcestis is a film made out of a reaction to the difficulty of living through Coronavirus. In many ways, the characters live similarly, trapped within the confines of their home, only existing within walls. It is only through dreaming that they are able to enter the outside world. Gibson’s film seems to be a meditation on isolation, but also on the possibilities of a collective isolation. Gibson explains this meditation: “I make films because I’m trying to work things out, I’m trying to discover meaning through making them, in relation to my own life.  I don’t have an argument I want to put forward. I work things out in the process of making them.”


Gibson tells me that Dreaming Alcestis was co-scripted by Maria Nadotti, “an amazing feminist, cultural theorist, and translator.” The artist explains further: “She was utterly key in how the film was structured. She kept saying to us ‘who wants to watch a film that answers questions? Films that ask questions, are much better: that’s way more interesting.’ And it’s so true. It wouldn’t be the film it is without Maria. She pushed us to be fearless, to make it wordless and silent, she pushed it to be collective.”

Perhaps more than Gibson’s other films, Dreaming Alcestis seems to offer up a space in which to reflect on the complexities of living in a fractured world. Through the political potential of dream space, she explores what it means to experience pure feeling, to reach deep inside oneself to uncover what is so often hidden. Dreaming Alcestis is a challenge to undertake a journey, not only across a continent (as Gibson did) but through the metaphoric and poetic. By developing an immersive experience, she invites the viewer to undertake the journey with her, as if they too, were characters in the film.