Woman, Life, Freedom: Year Zero
Techno coincided with my own personal journey towards freedom. At Berghain, we used to talk about being upstairs or downstairs. When you go up upstairs, it’s a totally different vibe. Downstairs feels much more loose and free. I have always loved house music and I probably always will, but it doesn’t give me the cathartic relief anymore, not as much as techno does. It’s the aggressiveness, the abrasiveness, the hardness.
Smell of rubber returns tread to the road, where we expect open vistas and find the windshield fogs the road, breaks up—a preview of the next few years—a caravan of rescissioned expectations, crab walk of wish and detachment, inventories “looking to a future that wasn’t coming as expected.”
How can we explain the fact that some anarchists and many other leftists are respecting health rules dictated by a “state of exception,” while fascists are the ones reclaiming their freedom to do whatever they like? There is a comedic exchange of roles, whereby fascists proclaim themselves as the “defenders of freedom” and progressives emerge as the defenders of the law.
Giulia Colletti
e-flux journal editors