73. Short diversions

This week its a short episode with some optimistic links for these increasingly dark times. The war in the Ukraine is unbearable, the new IPCC report is unbearable. And closer to home, there have been recent, vast, and devastating floods in NSW and Queensland too.

So, optimism. And distraction.

Juha van 't Zelfde recently put together a new section added to the Designing The Social, an ongoing and expanding exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Called RoXY: nightclub as cultural crowbar Juha's room explores the history of the RoXY club in Amsterdam (1987-1999), connecting it back to earlier radical movements, the Provo and Constant (Nieuwenhuys)’s New Babylon in the 1960s. Juha has been talking for years about the doing some museum-exhibition-y-thing about the 'liberatory spaces of nightclubs' bringing together his curatorial work with his other interests in club culture and electronic music. He sent me a link to his excellent impressionistic mini-documentary that accompanies the exhibition. Assembled from archival footage and interviews, it captures past utopian moments and teases out potential old threads - the 'anti-museum', everyday resistance, Situationism - that might be picked up and reimagined by younger folks in the present. It opens with a snippet of Willem Sandberg, then of the Stedelijk Museum,