Dancefloorensick is a six-part visual mixtape by Riccardo Benassi.  Shot at a September 11, 2021 Tanzdemo [dance demonstration] street party protest against nightlife restrictions coinciding with the cancellation of tenant protection laws.

The first film was 1895’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. A reflexive film—documenting the namesake factory owned by the photographic inventor and thus showing their cinematic technology’s prowess—exists in triplicate: truth varies—and, regardless, it’s mostly marketing.

Today we dance in emptied-out factories and warehouses, industrial spaces of a different kind of repetition and anonymity, evacuated by economic changes, unemployment, the entertainment of our deindustrialized labor market.

What role do these party-protest images serve? Proof that images aren’t reality, and that reality is fleeting? That language and music have nothing to do with the retina? We keep watching.