Advisor/tutor: Hypatia Vourloumis

Arnhem, June 2019

Abstract

“Nightlife Against Form” investigates the politics and aesthetics of nightlife. The use of a transversal methodology allows it to ponder various influences between music, artworks, theory and experience in its search for practices of nightlife that move beyond order and form. Beginning with the phenomenology of the night, its history and social-cultural meaning and reputation are made explicit. The night is shown as a space outside the order of civil society, where deviant subjects and practices flourish and produce nightlife as a fugitive and insurgent practice. Contemporary nightlife as it happens in nightclubs is investigated for its roots in communities of queers and persons of colour. While they may be creating a heterotopian area of designated excess, nightclubs have also always been providing safe environments for people to come together and find community. The possibilities of the formation of this fluid community are ultimately identified as what creates a queer utopian space on the dance-floor.