Nessun Dorma

On June 11th 2021 as the European Football Championships were getting ready to kick off, the Italian television played the famous Nessun Dorma (Italian for “none shall sleep”), an aria from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tourandot. Watching the scenes unfold was an audience of prospective sleep trainers, enjoying their evening meal while attending a three-day workshop that would teach them how to help their clients sleep better to a better sleep, and ultimately to a better life.

The culture of hyper–productivity often regards sleep as a waste of time or as something that the wise people should avoid doing. We may be mapping the Earth extensively and launching commercial flights into space, but in fact we understand very little about sleep, still one of the final frontiers for humankind. But for how long?

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities of our sleep patterns. Technology, stress, disruption to our daily routines and worries about the future have worsened our relationship with natural rest, but also turned it into a topic of research and exploration at the same time.

Nessun Dorma is a visual exploration of the current activity around sleep and the connected territories of dream. The project started in 2020 with a first chapter about ASMR artists and is currently ongoing and expanding into documenting fields such as neuroscience, industrial design, hotel accommodation, and personal experiences of spirituality.