Nightlife and safer spaces: What does safety mean in the new emerging event formats?
We welcome Folly Ghost as a guest curator and moderator for this upcoming discussion.
The pandemic has shifted the way we socialize and party. During the current semi-lockdown, all cultural gatherings have moved online. Thinking about our activities and experiences over the past summer and for the coming year, events have been/will be smaller in size because of the necessary restrictions that come with the pandemic, therefore organizers and partygoers are still adapting. Hygiene concerns have changed substantially, however the demand for other forms of safety, such as prevention of abuse, remains unresolved. Countless protocols have been written about how to create a safer space in a club, but we still have a lot to learn on how to deal with a reduced in person audience and online events.
What are the challenges that current events bring in terms of safety? How can we further explore ways to gather with the constraints of nowadays? What does it mean to be safe?
This talk’s purpose is to investigate alternatives to meet and celebrate while contemplating the need of feeling physically and emotionally secure.
We look forward to discussing with:
Isabela Siqueira - Events manager with an international background and over 10 years of experience with diverse B2B and B2C events in Brazil, going from fashion events to mega-events, such as Summer Olympic Games Rio 2016, Isabela has been building her career in Berlin ever since she moved to the city in 2017. In the city, she has been producing DICE Conference + Festival for 3 years and produced EMPOWE/Ar for 2 years – both multi-disciplinary festivals. In 2018, she founded Arrudas with a friend and, together, they create safe spaces so that peripheric cultures can be performed and showcased. Besides events, Isabela is currently on the second year of her Masters in Management of Creative Industries at bbw Hochschule, in Berlin.
Camille Barton - is an artist, writer and cultural somatics educator, working on the intersections of wellness, drug policy and transformative justice. Camille is the director of the Collective Liberation Project, and the creator of a trauma informed approach to diversity and decolonisation work that centres the body and lived experience. Camille serves ritual bass as DJ AfroOankali, playing a hypnotic blend of low end frequencies and polyrhythms which celebrates the Afro - Caribbean influence in electronic music and underground club culture. Their art practice uses dance, improvisation, ritual, bass healing and Afrofuturism to weave new realities fusing pleasure and social change. Camille is currently researching grief on behalf of the Global Environments Network, creating a tool kit of embodied grief practices to support efforts for intersectional, ecological justice.
Katharin Ahrend - has been part of the United We Stream team from the very beginning. Her main activities there include the development of awareness and safety guidelines for the project and the platform as well as diversity-sensitive and inclusive program work. Recently, she has also become the spokesperson for United We Stream. At the Clubcommission Berlin , she heads the Awareness & Diversity department, which is structurally concerned with how to create safer and multifaceted spaces within club culture. Katharin completed her Masters in Cultural Management in Hamburg and has since worked for various cultural projects in Germany and the Middle East as well as for various festivals. Among other things, she was artistic director of the Artlake Festival and was substantially involved in building up the Feel Festival. In recent years she was responsible for the cultural development and cultural-political representation of the former mint Alte Münze in Berlin.
Moderation, Curation & DJ:
Folly Ghost is a Brazilian DJ and curator based in Berlin and a core member of No Shade, a collective, training program and club night series for femme, trans and non-binary DJs. His tracks are a collection of seductive rhythms with a fierce bass that set the mood for a celebration of bodies. He enjoys exploring a wide variety of peripheral sounds such as Jersey Club, Ghetto House, Ballroom Music among other diasporic beats. Influenced by his upbringing in Rio de Janeiro, mixtures of Baile Funk are often featured in his sets, however Folly Ghost's main commitment is not to genres, but to creating a space for lust and delight. Besides being a dance floor fire starter, he is a proud instigator of social and political debates and an avid advocate for diversity in clubs and beyond. His experience as a trans immigrant motivates him to incite conversations about discrimination and colonialism that aim to locate and dismantle normalised violence against minorities.
The panel will be live streamed on the Music Pool Youtube channel.
We look forward also to questions and comments from the audience that you can send to the panel via the chat.
After the discussion, Folly Ghost will play a DJ set, and we invite you all stay on, enjoy the music and keep the conversation going.