Naarm-based DJ/artists Sezzo and Makeda Zucco are interested in the history of experimental dance music as a basis for revolution. From techno to house, disco to garage, jungle to hip-hop, each genre began as a form of expression for the marginalised.

The club can be viewed as a type of social experiment – a Utopian testing ground for the celebration of individuality and togetherness in coexistence. Club dancing tends to be intuitive and spontaneous, and its appeal to the oppressed lies in its being socially created without reference to external authority.

Melbourne’s iconic Tote Hotel will be transformed into PRECOG, a dance party where invited artists combine electronic music, sound art, performance and installation, that foreground non-cognitive modes of understanding beyond Western coloniser logic.

Curated by SEZZO SNOT
Produced by Makeda with MATKA and Hannah Donnelly

Club Theory: two recombinant texts on the impossible space between theory + experience

It is easy to see why early dance music theorists saw the club as a utopian space. Clubbing looks like a metaphor for what is possible when we are with and responding to others while being totally ourselves: a communal celebration of each person’s desires and actions. But the Afrofuturist theories we use to frame the revolutionary potential of early genres of dance music like Chicago house, Detroit techno, and jungle have not lead to the free worlds they predicted. Apart from the persistence of post-colonial material inequality, each of these styles originating from marginalised, queer people of colour have been transformed into scenes dominated by white ‘bro-ppressors.’ Further, queerness is a coveted aesthetic, detached from its history as a hard-won political category and reconstituted as a club look. — DJ Sezzo Snot & Sally Olds, read the full essay on AQNB

Image by Claudia Greathead, ‘Boys pose with Renaissance statue’ (2015). Courtesy the artist.