Surveillance camera footage captures the bus full of police in riot gear entering the territory of an art center at 31 Nyzhnoiurkivska St. in Podil district on May 15, 2021.
In my work as a DJ, I have encountered numerous, frustrating scenes of conflict over the years between the nightlife crowds and state and pseudo-state authorities. These encounters existed on a broad spectrum from verbal to physical, individual to collective, biased to corrupted. Each revealed imbalances intolerance in stark terms.
In 2014, I started developing an archive of such attacks and confrontations, predominantly official reports and statistics… the relatively dry material which ensures these highly charged moments aren’t forgotten. In more ways than one, this archive can be read as a memorandum on the evolving ideals of a generation and a governing apparatus unsure how to quell or accommodate the emerging values of their constituents.
Police on a dancefloor, Closer Club, Kyiv, December 10, 2015. Photo by Nikolay Karabinovych
A few years later, I was invited to take part in the art program of a major techno festival in Kyiv. This large-scale event, with an attendance numbering in the thousands, challenged me to activate the ravers’ consciousness in a gesture of community compassion and group empowerment.
And so, with white chalk, I wrote out the information I had been collecting on these various attacks on one of the dance floors. Then I took a photo the moment before the crowds arrived.
Over the course of the night, the dancers took charge. Their moves erased my writing. Taxonomic information was blurred, obscured and distorted. Eventually, it was erased entirely. The chalk text morphed into a memory sustained in formless dust.
Throughout the evening, I observed the crowds’ effect, documenting the stages of their dance-based destruction in still images.
