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GEGEN BERLIN
City
Berlin
How did you get into djing and producing?
Long story. To make it short, I came out from punk and found myself into promotion of big illegal rave parties in Italy and Europe. I spent all of the nineties creating contexts on where to set dance and techno free on a d.i.y. base. After 20 years I felt the desire to release the absorbtion of musics, images and thoughts into performing it. This is how i came up to dj and funnily enough this moment was convergent to my coming out.
What is your preferred method of playing
Toward digital I would say and I would love to bring the discussion out of a bipolarised dialectics between the sad tropics of an analogic warm sound's lost purism and the digital designed engineering of the information market. I'd invite to mix every source up and find your own individual way to comunicate, being it a mega set up or a simple two traktor decks in synch. Personally speaking I do not consider myself a dj but a writer bringing my rethorics to a synesthesic experience as my formation is social-anthropology and I work and teach in the queer studies and cultures of conflicts field. So it is about multiplyting languages to expand identities and life visions. It is about you as the filter and it is about the crowd as active response. It is about spaces and times crisis. It is about otherness. It is about liberation.
Present/Future
Well I am co-producing this bi-monthly event in Berlin that became an incredible expereince in one of the biggest and sexually liberating spaces in Berlin called KitKat Club. I am working with JopRec artist Fernando Poo and the label owner Konik Polny and I might start some collaboration in the future the new born techno roman label Black Sam Records.
To give you a meaning of what i think about queer spaces i'll post you some of the gegen manifesto i wrote one year ago to define the party:
☯ GEGEN MANIFESTO ☯
Against yourself. Around queer narratives.
Gegen is a complex word in German because it has two opposite meanings.
Historically speaking it means "against", signifying all the counter cultural movements since the very beginning of youth cultures but if you apply the word to time, it means "around". One meaning is closed, defined in terms of space. The other is open and undefined in terms of time. In the contemporary moment the idea of "enemy" — in which a thought and an action can be identifiable as "against" — is not there and is not clear anymore as power relationships changed through the development of post-modernism. And this gave space to markets to regenerate themselves through the queer-counter cultural movements by producing an oligopoly of empty events repeating themselves until their fast extinction and in the same time by crystallising the institutionalisation of big "queer meccas" which exercise more and more power on the scene. This process is verifiable in Berlin as the incubator of new world trends in the arts of entertainment.
This basic tension gives the spaces and the times for a new proposal to blossom from the ashes of the historical and infamous queer techno party called "SABOT°AGE BERLIN" which characterised fades of mutation in some of the wildest Friedricshain nights. The aim is playing with the solitude of the political meaning of GEGEN as a suicidal mechanism of the "self" or the sublime crisis of enemy subtraction as the aggression of dialectics. A linguistic game of pop art where the semantic putsch of "Gegen" becomes the broken mirror of its own impossibilities. The electric fear to find oneself multiple by being against oneself and unrecognisable. The dangers of being desireful in a psycho dramatic performance. The political practice of hallucinatory love to defy hate as antagonistic, identitarian mechanism.
Perceiving the idea of community as a demagogic form for bigger powers like religions, societies and markets to exercise their violence with the fake flag of politically correct partecipation, we do not wish to design a party just to give you a safe space and protection. We are not selling you the possibility to be "queer" for one night. We want to expose you to your own fears and pleasures by pushing you to understand how your own power mechanisms are produced. This is why we invite you to be GEGEN by performing your psychosis, by being the enemy of yourself, by thinking and being out of b/order and by destroying every rational thought.
www.warbear.com
www.facebook.com/iamwarbear
http://www.facebook.com/gegenbln
www.gegenberlin.com
Photo by Aghia Sophie.