Pedro Marum: Dance Ordinance

Who is the master who makes the bass beat?

Liberation and dissolution of the limits - these are often used as descriptive traits of the ‘rave’, a site for emancipation enhanced by a series of well-known and coordinated technologies of ecstasy. Although, the suspension of disbelief is a luxury for just a few. From the security teams to the gendered toilets, curfew hours and sound limiters, or even tactics adopted to protect the scene such as door selection and safe(r) space policies, many are the apparatuses designed to shape, control, ban or shut down. There can be no unbridled ambition of utopia but rather a constant negotiation with the rules and social order. We can abide, bypass and subvert, resist or become invisible, but the dance cannot be stopped.

Dance Ordinance will look into the regulations and interferences that operate on clubbing politics in different historical and geopolitical contexts while giving particular insight to narratives of resistance by communities of ravers, artists and party-collectives. Pedro Marum invites several guests including musicians, DJs, label owners, performers and ravers, to their thoughts, anxieties and hopes over the course of two hours.

Happening at Frei_raum Q21 exhibition space, this community meeting becomes part of the exhibition Dance of Urgency, curated by Bogomir Doringer, transforming it into a platform that brings collective gathering and public debate right at the center of the gallery as an installation-performance where the clubbing/rave politics bleeds out of the clubs and raves so any passerby at the gallery can listen, join and intervene.

Pedro Marum is an artist, curator and DJ, whose work currently explores club/rave culture and its intersection with queer feminist politics. They’re a co-founder of the infamous Lisbon collectives mina and Rabbit Hole, of the Berlin-based artist and curatorial collective XenoEntities Network. Marum is currently an artist-in-residence at the Q21.