The Freedom Room
2021

Hanging out, gathering together, drinking and jamming, dancing and revelling, the scenes and spaces of music are dynamic constructs that give way to a range of experiences and encounters. From garages and basements where teenagers play music, forming bands that are fundamentally alternative families, to abandoned warehouses and peripheral architectures where clubs emerge, allowing for night-life, party experience and alternative identities, music is not only the writing of songs or the production of releases, it is also enabling paths of agency, imagination, intensity and a sense for world-making potentiality. As the singer for the band Gatens Evangelium stated: “this is our freedom room.”

Following such a perspective, the project takes the form of a music club created inside an empty warehouse on the harbor in Struer as part of Struer Tracks sound art biennial. Working in collaboration with teenagers in the city, the club presents a program of performances, talks, listening sessions and gatherings over the course of the sound art biennial, where musicians, artists, and local communities are invited to jam together, to hang out, to play and perform, to dance, listen, sleep or simply daydream in the chill out room. As part of the club, a collection of sound and video works are presented, which function as essays onto the question of club-going and parties: parties are unpacked as complex and creative forms of get-together, where relationships are nurtured and also broken, where escape and erotic connection are pronounced, and where one is put on hold as a social subject: rather, parties, and the zone of the club, support a letting go. Or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls: doing, the creative fact of bodily being.

Exhibited as part of Struer Tracks sound art biennial, Struer, Denmark, August 20 – September 6, 2021. https://struertracks.dk/en/

Event with presentations and performances by the artist Jana Winderen, Brandon LaBelle, and local musicians Steffen Lystlund with friends, August 21, 2021.