Day one of
the clubroom is over. At the moment the space is in the throes of gaining an
identity via suggestions for objects, furniture, atmosphere… Guests to the
clubroom left their marks and designer attributes in the form of words or
thoughts scrawled on paper and positioned where they should be
develeoped in the space.
Club le
Bomb was a platform for performance, music and action as well as a place where
friends could get together and have fun in a city that, at the time, had a
repressive and very conservative attitude towards clubbing, music and leasing
spaces for events within the city centre. After having to leave the space 6
months following it’s opening, the Club le Bomb team took it on the road,
touring throughout Europe and America for the next 5 years. Clubroom at the
NGBK picks up on some of the experimental ideas tested out at the time of Club
le Bomb, such as mobile décor and constructing the space within a space to
create a ‘club without walls’ (before virtual clubs!), but within the field of
the gallery and art mediation.
WONDERBAR
is a club space run by poet and event organizer Gaby Bila Günther since 2008 in
Berlin. She explained to us that due to legalities concerning the room as well
as residential problems, she keeps the membership of the club to an absolute
minimum but does try to provide a space for unusual and cutting edge performers
to come by and present their work, even sometimes at very short notice. Gaby
aims to organize further parties that stem from the core site of Wonderbar,
kind of like tentacles that spread out across the city and beyond.
JOKAklubi
means ‘any club’ in Finnish and is basically a group of performing artists,
some permanent members, some not, who get together to create spontaneous,
improvised series of short performances over one evening. Niina explained to us that JOKAklubi started
life as a method for her and her friends (the core member group is made up of 3
women) to get together and do things, that it doesn’t need a permanent room to
function but that it does need an external audience (participative or not) and
that it somehow benefits from the presence or inclusion of so-called guest
stars who appear repeatedly in various circumstances. She also explained that
travelling out of Berlin was quite important as somehow it was easier for her
to ‘perform’ in front of strangers, thus the need for recognized audience
members was not necessary but the need to have trusted members within the
performance team was.
Following
presentations of each of the ‘clubs’ we started a short discussion about what
the important attributes of clubs are – does a club always need a room to
function, should it be exclusive or have members or should it be open to
all, does it have to be notorious to get
attention, what is the criteria for membership or joining a club, is it
possible to run a club during the day and without alcohol provision, what are
the aims of a club, is it just a place for hanging out with friends or is there
a more profound political agenda behind it, what are the advantages and
disadvantages of being a club proprietor and lastly how do you document your
club and its events? We also discussed the advantages of designing your own
club room that grew out of necessity or immediate events and surroundings
rather than a desire to create a ‘cool’ or ‘different’ place to hang out and
the possibility of failure within this.
chouette
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