Party Studies

What happens as soon as one enters the party? How does the party function as a social get together? Are there particular lessons we might take from the party in terms of approaching social life and the orientations of subjectivity?

Party Studies is conceived as a framework for probing the party as a dynamic and complex expression. The party is posed as an experimental scene of togetherness where festivity, music, delirium, hospitality, aggression and intoxication are set loose as defining principles. As such, the party punctuates instances of passage, escape, bonding, and wreckage, moving from social ritual and ceremonial feasting to celebratory rupture; from small-scale get togethers to all-out raves, from weddings to birthdays, apartments to peripheral territories, parties are defining of sociality as transformational and transitional.

Following the expressive dynamics of the party, Party Studies unfolds as a series of publications, workshops and events. Central to the project is a consideration of the party as fundamentally a relational construct that enables as well as strains forms of sociability, where hospitality and the inhospitable, pain and pleasure interweave and intersect. In this sense, the common world that is a party is equally excessive, tending towards breakage, even violence, and the ache of the hangover. Defining a space of affinity, the party equally exceeds itself, giving way to an erotic intensity where relationality moves toward states of delirium. The party emerges as a critical and creative space for reworking the orders of the body, and is considered in its extreme as fueling a movement where good society is put on hold, the presentation of the self is disordered, and where expressions of bohemian life figure a world of passion and nocturnal knowledge.

These are perspectives suggestive for Party Studies, as well as for following the party as what enables a continual rediscovery of oneself and what it means to be with others.

Developed in collaboration with Asociación de Música Electroacústica y Arte Sonoro de España, Madrid. Other partners include Lucia Udvardyova, from Easterndaze, Budapest, and Octavio Camargo, from Sala 603, Curitiba.

The project has resulted in two books thus far, with volume 1 addressing the topic of house parties, and how domestic spaces become important sites for social gathering, and volume 2 focusing on underground culture and the urgencies around safe spaces for marginalized communities.