The event involves the restaging of historical clubs of great importance for queer and feminist activist work internationally. It takes inspiration from the struggles throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s around gender identities and construction, marked by the births in 1975 of Lesbisk Front, in 1989 of the campaigning group Stonewall or in 1990 of the qay rights organisation Queer Nation. Organised as a night club, Culture Club, 2nd act celebrates important cultural figures and phenomena from those decades, from Ziggy Stardust to Carmelita Tropicana at the woman’s theatre collective WOW Café Theater, via the right to free love and Queer Nights Out: "Closets are for clothes!" The publics are invited to let themselves be temporarily transformed, and play within these revolutionary pockets of resistance.

Culture Club, 2nd act is developed as part of a long-term project initiated in September 2012 by MYCKET, a collaborative project by Mariana Alves (designer), Katharina Bonnevier and Thérèse Kristiansson (artists and architects). The event is realised in the framework of the project NormCreativeSettings set up by Rebecca Vinthagen and Lina Zavalia. It is a co-production between Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Årsta Society for Fredrika Bremer Studies, Unga Klara, and it is kindly supported by W.I.S.P. (Women in Swedish Performing Arts).

Lecture & Workshop:

Tuesday, 23 October 2012, 4 – 7 p.m.
The New Beauty Council: Staging Herstories and Futures (in English)

Staging Herstories and Futures addresses forms of subjectification in relation to the construction of taste, beauty and ugliness. It questions how the experience of the urban landscape can be altered by means of artistic tactics, movements involving the body, how tolerance or intolerance emerge if someone or something articulates them. The lecture and workshop address a number of ways to how consider the urban built environment in relation to the city, so that this can be perceived as a realm for costumes enabling us to become what we want, how the urban scape can be re-dressed to become what we want within its inclusive, pluralistic and yet non-coherent and non-patriarchal context.

Recommended reading list:
Claire Tancons, Occupy Wall Street: Carnival Against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility.
The New Beauty Council, There Is Some Accounting For Taste in Objects, Journal of Applied Art, Berlin, Issue 4, 2010.

For the workshop, please bring along a piece of garment that you possess but don't want to wear on occasions such as going to an event at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

The event is a co-organised by the research group Architecture in Effect and the course Architecture and Gender at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH (Stockholm).

For more information please visit:
www.mycket.org
www.newbeautycouncil.org
www.wisp.se
www.architectureineffect.se

With thanks to Tensta konsthall.