Research
Undercover / Underground
situations where people are both participants and witnesses
Happenings often took place in the art world, protected by its freedom to experiment. Illegal raves operate outside that safety, shaped by police pressure, community resilience, and queer strategies of survival. Where one sometimes bents the rules, the other often breaks them. One centers around the artist’s gesture, the other center crowd, beats and self-made spaces. These differences are not obstacles—they are invitations to rethink how art and community shape each other.
Our research takes place inside nightlife and theater festivals, through site-specific and tailor-made interventions. We strive to create momentum in each iteration along the way. By moving between these contexts, we test how each environment responds to risk, collectivity, sensuality, and disruption.
We explore how rave energy can enter a framed space without losing its freedom. We play with the precision and attention of performance without interrupting the flow of the night. Bringing these forms together allows us to explore togetherness: situations where people are both participants and witnesses, both free and aware, both vulnerable and powerful.Our aim is not to recreate either form but to search for what happens in the in-between.
Here, new modes of gathering become possible—shaped by rhythm, by bodies, and by the desire to create worlds that last only a night but echo far beyond it.
The fringes of collective experiences
This artistic research line investigates the overlaps, tensions, and potentials between two forms of collective art-making: the 1960s Happening and the contemporary world of (queer) illegal raves. Both forms challenge traditional boundaries. Such as boundaries between artist and audience, between stage and public space, between planned action and spontaneous chaos.
Our work asks how these forms speak to each other today, and what new possibilities emerge when they meet.
Happenings were created to break down the frame of the art event. They relied on chance, risk, and direct audience involvement. Illegal queer raves, in their own way, do something similar: they gather people in temporary, hidden spaces where bodies, sound, and community create a shared intensity. Both practices use collective presence, uncertainty, and temporary autonomy as creative tools.