Masoom Doesn’t Sleep is a quiet, durational performance that stages sleep as an act of vulnerability, ritual, and political tension. It is inspired by Penelope Sleeps by Mette Edvardsen and Matteo Fargion — a work that lingers in mythic space, where sleep becomes a metaphor for dreaming, waiting, and becoming. But where Penelope drifts into sleep as a poetic act, Masoom Doesn’t Sleep performs actual sleep — not mythic, not symbolic, but bodily and real.

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This piece also resonates with Tilda Swinton’s The Maybe, in which she slept in a glass box in public view. Yet unlike Swinton, here there is no glass, no museum frame, no protective layer between the sleeper and the watcher. The vulnerability is direct, uncontained, and intimate.

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• What does it mean to sleep in public?

• What does the sleeping body invite — empathy? discomfort? voyeurism? care?

• Who has the right to sleep without fear?

• What happens when a queer, racialized performer makes themselves unconscious — on a stage — in front of strangers?

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In a world that rewards performance, productivity, and control, to simply sleep — visibly, unapologetically — becomes an act of refusal. But even here, sleep is not neutral. It is charged with precarity. The alarm is real. It will ring. The rest is always temporary. Sleep becomes a gesture of trust. Of exhaustion. Of resistance. Of letting go.

 

Why This Work?

Because I want to reclaim sleep as something sacred — and public.
Because I want to test what it means to be watched without performing.
Because I want to make visible what we try to privatize.
Because I am tired.
Because I want to rest.
Because the alarm is always coming.