The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish

What is a sense of self, when landscapes and beings exist in co-evolution and co-habitation? What manners have we developed to attune ourselves to the various untranslatable experiences and unknowable ways of being? How do we investigate if mountains dream of us as we do of them? If we know that the average human has between three and eight dreams per night, how many are the interspecies dreams that shape our world’s nights? Do fish dream of themselves? Do butterflies have lucid dreams? Is electric sheep what androids really dream of?

Investigating how magic, art, science and dreams constitute one another and manifest themselves across all beings, The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish dwells in those spiritual, creative and scientific practices that invite us to re-evaluate how we share this planet with all creatures and life forms.

The festival investigates the role dreams play in our lives. Understanding dreams as both sleep-time experiences and as threshold zones in which the cogito and the oneiric coexist, the festival gathers architects, artists, historians, philosophers, musicians and scientists to share their knowledge and tell the stories that celebrate the entanglement between self, mind and planet.

The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish began with a two-day gathering in Porto and continued in London through podcasts, videos and other releases until early 2023. Participants included Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio, Federico Campagna, Nicola S. Clayton, Onome Ekeh, Cru Encarnação, Alex Jordan, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Nahum, Hatis Noit and Rain Wu, and the programme included a screening of films by artists Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, Rosalind Fowler, Derek Jarman, Dominique Knowles, Ben Rivers and Himali Singh Soin.

The visual identity of the project was created by Giles Round.

The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish was organised in collaboration with Serpentine’s General Ecology project, in partnership with Galeria da Biodiversidade – Centro Ciência Viva. It was the fifth edition in the festival series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, which explored intelligence, sentience and existence across more-than-human worlds. Previous editions addressed animal, human and artificial consciousness, language and interspecies communication (Language, ZSL London Zoological Society, May 2018); interior multitude, swarming organisms, symbiosis and entanglements (We Have Never Been One, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, December 2018); plant sentience, intelligence, communication with the vegetal world, and forms of eroticism, mysticism and healing (PLANTSEX and With Plants, Cinema Lumière / French Institute and EartH Hackney, April/May 2019); and the teeming, entangled life of the ground, land, soil and Earth (The Understory of the Understory, presented online via the specially created website themind.fish, designed by artist Giles Round, December 2020).

The The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish series was curated by Lucia Pietroiusti (Founder, General Ecology Project and Strategic Advisor, Ecology, Serpentine) and Filipa Ramos (Artistic Director, Galeria Municipal do Porto). Editions 1–4 were co-curated and produced with Kostas Stasinopoulos (Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine) and Holly Shuttleworth (Producer).