Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark than His Rider is both a fable and a survival guide. The collected work by Francesco Merlini spans different years, possibly quite distant from one other; shot in all four continents, his pictures reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, seeks for something nameless. The title is drawn, almost literally, from a 19th century manual of optics. The original sentence – “[…] much better in the dark than his rider” – refers to a horse’s night vision compared to a human’s.
The selected sequence of pictures unravels around the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, engaging with hypnagogia as a sensory yet dreamlike mode of semiconscious representation. Images make up mind’s psychic contents. If in dreams self-consciousness is suspended and images look real to the extent that we are sleeping, when dozing we can consciously guide them because partially aware that we are dreaming. Stated otherwise, in lucid dreams we know we are faced with the contents of our imagination, whose edges appear hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state we do experience both asleep and awake. Thanks to imagination, the dream matter turns into the mind’s real object again.

23,5×31 cm
Hard cover with embossing
Offset UV
80 pages
Paper:
Munken Lynx Rough 150 g/m²
Fedrigoni Sirio Nero 140 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Petal

Publication Revue N°1
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Saint Julien l'hospitalier Tome 1 - Claire Pedot
Un cahier - Michel Quarez
Un peu comme voir dans la nuit - Leif Elggren + CD
il y avait une ville - Laeticia L'Heureux
De lave et de fer - Laurent Feynerou
Lumières - Guillaume Chauchat
Il est si difficile de trouver le commencement - Helen Thorington
EMERGENCY - Jérémie Gaulin, Martin Desinde, Élodie Petit, Théo Robine-Langlois, M'hand Abadou Djezairi, etc.
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WREK The Algorithm! - Aarnoud Rommens, Olivier Deprez
Radio-Art - Tetsuo Kogawa
Buiding a wall - A book by Roméo Julien
Comment quitter la terre ? - Jill Gasparina, Christophe Kihm, Anne-Lyse Renon
Dédale - Laurent Chardon
Klima Pages #2 — Somptueuses Résidences
Délié - Baptiste Oberson
People in a faraday cage - Stéphanie Gygax
Musée des Beaux-Arts - Pierre Martel
interférence - 2 - maycec
Les Climats II (Japon) - Lola Reboud, Mariko Takeuchi 































