Dancefloorensick is a six-part visual mixtape by Riccardo Benassi. Merging the terms dancefloor, forensic, and sick, the series muddies language, sound, and movement, redeploying footage of ravers taken during Berlin’s prolonged covid lockdown. Shot at a September 11, 2021 Tanzdemo [dance demonstration] street party protest against nightlife restrictions coinciding with the cancellation of tenant protection laws, the tight images also remain somewhat unidentifiable—they could almost be any party anywhere. Benassi’s texts, which cycle between the poetic and the mundane, are layered over the video footage. Shifting from day to night, we are invited to watch the memories of what we might imagine is a loaded experience of sound, movement, and sociality.
As Chris Kraus writes, "Each fragment of reality contains a little bit of poison. You must be careful when ingesting it, never swallowing it whole." The dream of digital-music transcendence meets feet wetted by the puddly ground, MDMA hangovers, police fines, the ventilator beat of respiratory disease. Visually, linguistically, and aurally Dancefloorensick’s video-tracks buzz with noise: the noisiness of conflicting ideas, the noisiness of data everywhere, the noisiness of conformity-as-identity-crises, the noisiness of cicadas and cops’ drones, the noise of the four-on-the-floor rhythm drowning it all out.
