Sonia Boyce

*Move*, 2013. Single-channel colour video with sound. 11 minutes.

*Move (film still)*, 2013. Single-channel HD colour video with sound. 11 minutes

MOVE is a single-channel video commissioned for the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art. The film makes reference to two recent moments: the counter-cultural illegal nightclub scene in the Haga district of Göteborg during the 1980s, and the historic events that unfolded during the anti-globalisation protests in the summer of 2001 in the heart of the city. Working with cultural activist Johan Heintz, and DJ Kali (Hannes Westberg), the film explores the potency of place to connect and curtail collective action. A number of contemporary dancers were invited to interpret through improvisational movement both the recent histories of these sites and their own relationship to the public discussions these events in Sweden have engendered. Emerging from what was once an underground club, and is now a local history museum, the first dancer Anna Bergström performs on the streets in the Haga district. Once an industrial quarter of the city and a working class neighbourhood – now gentrified with coffee shops and designer craft-ware. Interacting with passers by, Anna traces the steps of the underground night-club scene. Her journey is inter-cut with footage of another dancer – Karolin Kent, whose lonely figure, crawling and dragging itself like a wounded animal, offers two perspectival views of the Hvitfeldtska School, which in 2001 saw anti- globalisation protestors barricaded by the police within the school grounds. Here, Karolin explores the bodyʼs relationship to the enormity of this site against the harsh surfaces of the car park, and the brickwork of the building. Concurrently, a troupe of dancers, led by Pia Nordin, clamber over each other, each following the otherʼs lead by wrestling and reacting to the architectural constraints of Schillerska School, the second site of police ʻkettlingʼ tactics. Inter-cut between these dance performances is the immersive and insistent rhythm of a night-club: a techno-clash of DJs and club revellers tattooed by dazzling lights against the backdrop of 1980s painted banners. Assembled together they create a psychedelic kaleidoscope of colours and conviviality that suggests an altered state of consciousness.

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