Fluchtpunkt* [2022]
Open duration performance-installation
* German: vanishing point; place of refuge
Fluchtpunkt is a sound, light and smoke installation. The work is highly adaptable and has been presented as an immersive, looped installation for galleries and club spaces, and as a ‘performance’ in front of a seated audience.
The work is a suspenseful choreography of animated stagecraft, including smoke machines, sound responsive lights and a dramatic audio landscape of submerged beats, sampled Eurodance vocals and extreme weather sounds (thunder and lightning, rain, wind); a recurring metaphor for conflict and resolution in 1990s dance music. Using hostile elemental effects and odd moments of pause and tension, the work keeps its audience perpetually at arms length; simulating a dance floor whilst denying a sense of straightforward escapism. In doing so, Fluchtpunkt invites you to reencounter the fantasy world of 1990s Eurodance and its disquieting, portentous rhetoric of utopia and disaster.
The work was originally commissioned by the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate for Salamagundy, a variety show curated by artist Mark Leckey. In its initial context, Fluchpunkt was installed on a theatrical stage in front of a seated audience at Dreamland’s historic Roller Rink. In lieu of a human performer, the work included a ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ style smoking doorway, theatrical curtains and roving spotlights, conjuring the space beyond the stage into a portal to an internal fantasy realm of the viewer’s own making.
‘Fluchtpunkt... captures...a gestalt whose separate elements come together in an atmospheric manifestation of their conceptual elegance. Taking the viewer into the heart of its storm, in spite of its cues to dance – strobes, dry ice and a rhythmic soundtrack – it rewards a certain stillness. Static, the gallery-goer can give way to the experiences it offers; the dramatic approximations of thunder claps and running water, digitally contrived in a recording studio. Read from another perspective, its tumult acts as a reminder of the inescapability of the climate crisis. Caught up in the smoke of its urgency, somehow humanity does its best to ignore the fire, dancing all the while to its oblivion.’
- Desmond Bullen, Northern Soul, 2024
2 min digest of phone footage taken by audience members at SOUP, March 2023.
Open duration performance-installation
* German: vanishing point; place of refuge
Fluchtpunkt is a sound, light and smoke installation. The work is highly adaptable and has been presented as an immersive, looped installation for galleries and club spaces, and as a ‘performance’ in front of a seated audience.
The work is a suspenseful choreography of animated stagecraft, including smoke machines, sound responsive lights and a dramatic audio landscape of submerged beats, sampled Eurodance vocals and extreme weather sounds (thunder and lightning, rain, wind); a recurring metaphor for conflict and resolution in 1990s dance music. Using hostile elemental effects and odd moments of pause and tension, the work keeps its audience perpetually at arms length; simulating a dance floor whilst denying a sense of straightforward escapism. In doing so, Fluchtpunkt invites you to reencounter the fantasy world of 1990s Eurodance and its disquieting, portentous rhetoric of utopia and disaster.
The work was originally commissioned by the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate for Salamagundy, a variety show curated by artist Mark Leckey. In its initial context, Fluchpunkt was installed on a theatrical stage in front of a seated audience at Dreamland’s historic Roller Rink. In lieu of a human performer, the work included a ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ style smoking doorway, theatrical curtains and roving spotlights, conjuring the space beyond the stage into a portal to an internal fantasy realm of the viewer’s own making.
‘Fluchtpunkt... captures...a gestalt whose separate elements come together in an atmospheric manifestation of their conceptual elegance. Taking the viewer into the heart of its storm, in spite of its cues to dance – strobes, dry ice and a rhythmic soundtrack – it rewards a certain stillness. Static, the gallery-goer can give way to the experiences it offers; the dramatic approximations of thunder claps and running water, digitally contrived in a recording studio. Read from another perspective, its tumult acts as a reminder of the inescapability of the climate crisis. Caught up in the smoke of its urgency, somehow humanity does its best to ignore the fire, dancing all the while to its oblivion.’
- Desmond Bullen, Northern Soul, 2024
2 min digest of phone footage taken by audience members at SOUP, March 2023.
