Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, ‘Somniculus’ (the Latin word for “light sleep”) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artifacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest. Preserved inside this structure of historiographic display, each object is representative of a place or a time and each artifact lives on as a container of its own history. The apparent necessity of seeing, the act of closing and opening the eyes, recalls the inevitability of sleep and its inescapable shadow: death.
