Staying Awake as a Signal for Consciousness, Resistance and Solidarity

Can we sleep when inequity looms? What does it mean to remain awake?

In 2013, artist Tushar Joag (1966–2018) initiated Are You Awake – a participatory sound installation that transformed Mumbai itself into a medium of inquiry and connection. Over one hundred citizens across Bombay engaged in a coordinated telephonic relay, responding to the words »sleep«, »sleeplessness«, and »waking«. Each conversation was recorded and then passed along to the next participant. This way a chain of personal encounters was created. Private and political topics blend into each other and opened reflections about wakefulness as a base for communal awareness.

Twelve years later, on the evening of July 23, 2025, a group of artists, friends, and participants came together at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and beyond to embark on a similar shared experience. Staying Awake: Towards the Thresholds of a Shared Dawn initiated by artist and current fellow Sharmila Samant was conceived as an homage to Tushar Joag to mark what would have been his 59th birthday. Samant’s work stretched that relay to a planetary scale. For twelve hours, as the earth turned and the first light appeared on distant horizons, voices and images emerged online from Fiji to Stuttgart. Participants from twelve global cities joined the stream before sunrise in their own locations. Some offered music or sound recordings, others shared images, texts, short films, performances or short reflections.

Their wakefulness became a collective choreography, one that was not rehearsed but lived in real time. What united the fragments was not aesthetic coherence, but the shared act of resisting indifference: a determination to »wake together«. And once more it became clear that mapping individual states onto broader sociopolitical rhythms can help to better understand seemingly complicated entanglements.