A new gay club night caused a stir in Berlin on January 8. Sadly we couldn't get there but Facebook was buzzing with praise and comments in the early hours of Sunday. "The result was wild, beyond any other expectation. 600 beautiful losers haunting the party until 11 in the morning (the dancefloors were packed) as a flying disaster about to come. Sublime." It's Gegen (against or around) and the people behind it did Sabotage previously. They have two dance floors, art, a philosophy and a great dark techno party. It's at M.I.K.Z., Revaler Str 99 and they're having the next party on Saturday 12 March. Stick it in your calendar. We have. Click the headline for what they say and links. More photos on Facebook here.
///GEGEN///
To give you the main lines of the Gegen-Scenario, we developed this concept in a moment where queer languages are being stereotyped in niche market identities so everything fell back in a cheap identitarian entertainment who did not produce anything else then empty oligopoles.
From roots to routes, The idea of the event plays around the loneliness of the gegen-ism. The fact that at the moment identity mechanisms are not the same anymore as they were from the sixties until the eighties as production processes changed and the definition of the enemy is not that clear anymore. but this created a meta-text, an open space of crisis that has to be used to analyse liberation processes.
and the main question at the back of the party is:
Do you need to be against to have an identity?
OR can you develop identity based on your desires?
This is why our GEGEN is not having an object (the use of Berlin was just an irony). And German people get completely caught in the issue because this idea clashes with the dialectical logic of the German speaking (if you allow me the generalization) so it is very interesting to see how people react in terms of thinking to their own processes in identities definition when they misses "nazi" or "kapitalismus" or the "sexismus" etc.. in their use of GEGEN.
So anyway on this concept we built up an event playing on a communication based on the detournation of the Jugendstil aesthetics with surrealistic elements inside it.
The contents' structure is constructed on an imaginary Cross; A mirror game that resolves itself in its inner opposition (still gegen).
we have two main dance floors.
- The first one is called GEGEN TANZ. IT deals and in the same times break with the tradition of SABOT°AGE we were working on before GEGEN. The idea is to produce a lightful queer positive dance floor using techno as a pattern to innest different discourses, from spoken words to incredibly strange music.
- The second Dance floor is opposed to the first one and it is called THE DARKNESS. It is a very special DEAD LOUNGE which is completely opposite and dedicated to an obscure and incredibly strange interpretations of queer culture. And it will be an oblique dining room with performances, video installations, little vaudeville shows and freakeries.
- Then we always have two art proposals that are one opposite of the other. In this first edition we had an Italian artist, MATTEO GIORDANO aka SKURO who proposed work on the mystiques of the social networks iconography with hand sewed 4 meters long black backdrops. At the other pole we had the beautiful NINA RAISINGER who is a genius of collage, mixing up all historical vanguards from jugendstil to Russian futurism and rationalism and is curating our illustration and graphic lines.
The result was wild, beyond any other expectation. 600 beautiful losers haunting the party until 11 in the morning (the dancefloors were packed) as a flying disaster about to come. Sublime.
WARBEAR - GEGEN
Places
M.I.K.Z., Revaler Str 99, Berlin-Friedrichshain on the corner of Modersohn Strasse
www.gegenberlin.org
www.facebook.com/gegenbln
www.myspace.com/gegenbln
www.gayromeo.com/gegen
berlin 
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