Palace of dreams
2003

Performance festival Amorph in Helsinki, August 29th – 31st 2003.
2 x 3 x 3 meter floating Castle made of white polystyrene.

The subject of the festival was micro-nations or alternative/utopian states.
Peter Callesen was invited into his role as self-crowned King. In 2002 he participated in the youth biennale Artgenda in Hamburg with a similar project. During a 2 weeks performance Peter Callesen, dressed up as a king, build and inhabited a floating Castle made out of recycled wood in the middle of the harbor of Hamburg.

In this project, Peter Callesen has minimized the performative aspect by placing the viewer and visitor in the center of focus. With his white floating castle, Peter Callesen wanted to create an interactive and contemplative platform for the viewers to dream and perform themselves into their own Kingdom or fairytale world. One at the time people could visit the castle, transported forth and back in a small boat by Peter Callesen himself. Arriving at the floating castle the guest would be left there alone, and after half an hour picked up again by Peter.

Symbolic the floating mobile castle can be read in different ways. The mobile castle suggests autonomy and something playful, as well as a contrast to the normal solid castle. The fact that the castle is floating and the aspect of water also suggest something dreamlike, something that will disappear again, something, which might just be a dream

This work is a continuation of some of Peter Callesen’s earlier works dealing with the reinterpretation of classical fairytales as well as a more general interest in memory in connection to childhood. These playful works exist in the lost land of childhood, between dream and reality, between possibility and impossibility. It is in this meeting or confrontation of these two conditions, in a kind of utopian embodiment, that these works of art become alive