Insomnia Salon | Reading on Rave and Leisure
This time Insomnia Salon is hosting a reading session, organised by Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club, about the politics of the leisure industry and rave culture, moderated by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė, Noah Brehmer, Vaida Stepanovaitė.
The focus will be on Mark Fisher’s Baroque Sunbursts (2016), which offers some juicy thoughts on rave as a kind of festive contagion that spreads new forms of communal bliss into miserably desocialised, commercially sterilized, urban space. Fisher addresses the historical war against the ravers in the UK and the onslaught of ‘mandatory individualism’ within the advanced capitalist culture industry. We also see Fisher’s text as a constructive way of framing questions about local histories of rave and leisure economies in Lithuania. Moreover, with the current hype around rave and dance culture in the neo-liberal creative city, pressing questions must be raised about the insurgent capacities of these social forms in the present.
Amidst the discussion we will also introduce Laurent de Sutter’s Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (2017), which explicates on technological and pharmacological developments –– namely introduction of electric street-lighting and insomnia-inducing or relieving drugs –– that have brought new possibilities for carrying on with life in the night: the nightclub and night-shift as two essential instances. Parts §22, 25, 26, 29, 30 of Chapter 3 this book is a suggested reading.
The texts can be found here: http://luna6.lt/ultimate-leisure-workers-club.html#capitalist-leisure-industry-and-rave-politics
The event will be conducted in English.
ULWC was initiated in 2020 by nomadic project space @Kabinetas & political hub Luna6 (Vilnius) as means to communally explore the politics and economics of leisure and pleasure. Drawing from the political potentials of leisure, the club hopes to link up with groups and individuals involved in the struggle to open new terrains for social liberation and communal joy in the night and beyond.
http://luna6.lt/ultimate-leisure-workers-club.html @ulwclub
The aim of the cycle of events of the Kaunas Artists’ House reading room “Insomnia Salon” is to expand the context of insomnia and to analyze various cultural phenomena related to sleep disorders. To what extent is insomnia associated today with creative processes, or it is a part of anxiety, insecurity, nightmares, exhaustion, or general boredom? All issues related to insomnia, sleep disorders and their symptoms are discussed in the salon, in a room where a group of people usually gathers to speak and discuss issues of politics, art, and literature.
Curator of the cycle: Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė.
