Whether in relation to jazz or techno, the club has historically been one of the places where the avant-garde comes together, protected by a thick cloud of sweat and smoke. This conversation celebrates clubbing culture as a space of both social and poetic emancipation that has nourished many artists’ practices. But beyond the hedonism it represents, this culture has also often been the crucible of deep political engagement, as evidenced by the legacy of 1980s Detroit techno and its links to anti-racist struggles in the USA, and more recently by the queer protest movement born in Tbilisi’s Bassiani club in 2018.
Andreas Angelidakis, Artist, Athens
DeForrest Brown Jr., Rhythmanalyst, Media Theorist and Curator, New York City
Isabel Lewis, Artist, Professor of Performative Arts, Berlin
Moderator: Bart van der Heide, Director Museion Bolzano-Bozen
Andreas Angelidakis (born in 1968) lives and works in Athens. Trained as an architect (Sci-ARC bArch, Columbia MSAAD), Angelidakis maintains a practice centered on research and exhibition often examined through the lens of the internet. Angelidakis has consistently challenged the end-product of architectural practice by reversing the representation-to-realization sequence of the production of buildings. He often starts with an existing building, producing models, films, ruins, installations or alternativehistories, blurring fact and fiction, smoothing out the borders between the real and the virtual. Recent exhibitions include The State of the Art of Architecture 1stChicago Architecture Biennial , 12thBaltic Triennial at CAC Vilnius 2015, Supersuperstudio, PAC Milano 2015, documenta14 Athens and Kassel.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is a rhythmanalyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. Brown has lectured at Spotify for Artists, Brown, Yale, and has written for Artforum and NPR. On Juneteenth 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. This year Brown published his first book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture on Primary Information, a critical history of techno and its roots in Detroit, Michigan.
Isabel Lewis (Santo Domingo, 1981), leaves and works in Berlin. Lewis is active in the fields of theater, music, and dance and is particularly recognized for introducing the format of the “occasion” to the field of contemporary. Lewis has created works around topics such as open source technology and dance improvisation (Communal EPIC Fiction, 2010), dances as cultural storage systems (Mountain Grass, Mountain Hare: bodily imprinting and social dances, 2012), future bodily techniques (BALLISTIC BODY, 2011), rapping as an embodied speech act (FLOW PLAY: Sensualized Speech and Hip Hop, 2013), and the sociological concept of erotic sociability (Unambitious Stripper 2017-ongoing).
Bart van der Heide is an art historian, exhibition initiator and director of Museion, Bolzano-Bozen, where he initiated the long-term research program TECHNO HUMANITIES. This three-year project (2021-2023) includes exhibitions, publications, panel discussions, and art mediation programs. The exhibition series focuses on urgent existential questions concerning human beings at the intersection of ecology, technology and economics. With TECHNO HUMANITIES, external international research teams explore and develop the issues addressed and with the involvement of local initiatives. The exhibition KINGDOM OF THE ILL represents the second chapter of the three-year project that launched in 2021 with the TECHNO exhibition.
The Conversations program for Paris + par Art Basel 2022 is curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou.
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