Notes
1 This must be the Space (original thesis title, 2021) was the thesis for my MA Cultural Musicology, supervised by Dr Oliver Seibt at the University of Amsterdam
2 the article format is available in vol 16.1 Spaces of Dancing of the open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture dancecult
3 core themes are space construction, urban geography and history, social spaces and the mapping their of, club cultures and berlin as club mecca. they are anaylses through the lenses of sociology and cultural musicology
1 This must be the Space (original thesis title, 2021) was the thesis for my MA Cultural Musicology, supervised by Dr Oliver Seibt at the University of Amsterdam
2 the article format is available in vol 16.1 Spaces of Dancing of the open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture dancecult
3 core themes are space construction, urban geography and history, social spaces and the mapping their of, club cultures and berlin as club mecca. they are anaylses through the lenses of sociology and cultural musicology
This Must Be The Space: Mapping Spaces of Post-1989 Berlin and their Relation to the Local Club Culture // Foraging Through Spaces of Dance
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing contemplates life beyond capitalist desire and destruction through an ethnography of the matsutake mushroom. She opens her prologue with the words:
“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just - like flowers - through their riotous colours and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures admits the terrors of interdeterminacy.” (p 1)
Although her analysis centres around the life path of the matsutake mushroom, it shows, if not calls for, a collaborative restructuring and resilience beyond its mycelium. The matsutake mushroom with its dystopian habitat of choice, its idiosyncratic commercial routes and high-end culinary status, sheds light on the possibility of drastic change through the loss of form or identity resulting in a regeneration that may have seemed previously impossible. The year 1989 saw the introduction of a new sense of precarity due to the imminent collapse of the known polarised world order. If a century of exhilarating globalised warfare had not already been enough of destabilisation to the world, then the last decade of the twentieth century manifested the instability in a grand manner. Despite all this, the Nineties are a pinnacle of hope in popular cultural memory. A glimpse of the promised progress settling in, a glimpse of resurgence from the ruins of the recent active and passive wars. When I initially read Tsing’s book, the metaphorical mushroom that came to my mind was the place I grew up in, and its cultural rebirth after a trouble-ridden (mid-)twentieth century. This place is Berlin, Germany.
Combining urban and cultural history, this thesis turned article examines the physical and sociological spaces past and present that enable(d) clubs to fruit like mushrooms do in autumn in Berlin. Fungi sprout in spaces that seem random at the surface, but underneath, a vast, interconnected network of mycelia is reveals their connections. The spaces of Berlin, Europe and club culture are linked with the urban fabric left behind after the GDR’s fall to argue that the underlying mycelium of physical and sociological spaces caused the mass sporing of clubs only in those spaces that were fertile for redefinition and demanded celebration in the form of danced-through nights.
read the full article here