Traumbagger is…

Traumbagger is a trans-media, immersive art event created by Lise Patt and Axel Forrester through their collaborative group Thin End of the Wedge and under the auspices of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. It brings together new art media and ageless rituals to explore the cross-cultural phenomena of dreaming. The Traumbagger borrows its name from the architectural-sculptural object that is central to the event, a name that, like the experience itself, oscillates between languages. Traum is the German word for ‘dream,’ a word that is only one vowel short of the dream’s mirrored double – ‘Trauma’ (in both English and German). In English, a ‘bagger’ is she who places, and sometimes captures by duplicitous means, material in a sack. In German, a Bagger is a dredging machine that excavates and brings buried material to the surface. Traumbagger is, therefore, both a dream dredging event that aims to excavate dream material but also a ‘bagging’ device that aims to capture not dreams but insights into the dream archive. Traumbagger is not a ‘dream-catcher’ for the dream archive does not reside in file cabinets of dream symbols and interpretations. Like the history of the human being that we each carry in our DNA, the history of our human being resides in the flickering images we each carry in the deep recesses of our consciousness.