Sometimes it has some advantages to get the result from analog film weeks later when an event is long over. In the case of “Rave the Planet” i got time to read all the news and look up some of the artists1. Around 200,000 people are said to visited “Rave the Planet”, the police spoke about 45,000 participants. Whatever the real number was, it still feeled like a lot of people. Only the vision changed a bit like that techno is recognized as a cultural form and become part of the UNESCO World Heritage. But also some really good statements like general and nationwide abolition of all dance bans, especially on christian holidays. I can understand the holidays and i respect it, but i still can’t get behind the “Tanzverbot”.

The marketing for that event was weird though. When i saw the news for the official successor of the ‘Love Parade’ just few weeks prior i was quite suprised.

After two years of ongoing pandemic experience i was totally ready to visit the parade. I also wanted to try out the 110 slide film from Lomography and i thought with cross processing it could get some interesting vibes to it. However, it doesn’t got the greens and yellows as advertised (i would have liked some reminiscence to neon), but i still like the lofi aesthetics.

The line-up was quite interesting with artists / communities like Freak De L’Afrique, Free People Collective or artists from the polish underground2, but the PRU Y RVU float got my attention. “It will represent artists and performers from different spheres of electronic music, queer, kinky- and club scenes. A significant part of them from Ukraine.”3 That sounded nice, and i heard about the ukrainian ‘Berghain’, the K41 club in a former brewery in Kiev. A queer safespace with the mathematical sign ∄ which means it doesn’t exist.4 It is sad though that these kind of safe spaces seems to vanish or change so radically due to the war5. One more reason for me to went with that float (it was still a demonstration).6

The mood and music from the float was neat and it was really cool to see the people dancing. For some a made a spontaneous present with a polaroid and i hope it created some nice memories for them.

Regarding the small scandal about Dr. Motte and the corona denier group: i believe his excuse. Not everyone wants to look up every splinter group and word with a possible connotation. The Freedom Parade in Łódź / Lodz7 is also still on my ‘someday i visit this’ list.

All in all though, i think the parade was a nice (and needed) counterpart to the other high political topics of the current days.

  1. Arte had a nice stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-zh9TA0vc0 ↩︎

  2. https://djmag.com/news/berlins-rave-planet-parade-announces-line-and-floats-2022 ↩︎

  3. https://ra.co/events/1545915 ↩︎

  4. https://k41community.fund/ ↩︎

  5. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/k41-kiew-club-eulitz-100.html ↩︎

  6. Although the polish underground had enough reasons to go with them: https://crackmagazine.net/article/profiles/poland-2020/ . But i don’t know if there was similarities with the float on the parade. ↩︎

  7. https://www.onlytechno.net/news/freedom-parade-is-back-to-lodz-after-20-years/ ↩︎