Reassembling East German Nightlife: Scores for Curating from Elusive Archives

“As a mode of curating from the elusive archives of GDR nightlife, we offer ‘scores’, which chart moments in which East German nightlife and notions of publicness therein are re-assembled across space and time, from the disco films themselves, to their early screenings and engagements with urban space, to how such traces might still live in the city’s streets today and become public once again in post-socialist screening spaces. Across the scores, different voices are accessed as we shuttle between past presents and present pasts, the historical and the contemporary, the descriptive and the speculative.”

Proposing four scores for curating from the elusive – and even evasive – (after)lives of GDR nightlife, this text turns to a methodology of “re-assembling”, which conveys a doubled and belated action of assembling, of bringing into relation the mostly overdetermined macro-policies of the GDR and the overlooked micro-practices of media cultures’ aesthetic, social, political assemblies.