FAST TRACK / SPEEDY BOARDING / PRIORITY

To avoid long waiting times and queuing at the door, we would like to ask you for some cooperation in order to let you access the club quicker and let us work fast The cloakroom demands most of the time – this is why it would be fantastic if you could help us

1. The Wardorbe is Free. Please hang up your clothes by yourself. You will find coat-hangers in big clothes baskets on the LEFT SIDE, right after the entrance door.

2. You MUST leave your jacket/ overcoat in the cloakroom. Preferably also hand in your sweater/ pullover – the club is very well heated!

3. Hang up your sweater/ pullover on a coat-hanger and put your jacket/ overcoat over it. Please DO NOT CRAM anything into the sleeves!

4. Please store your valuables safely and make sure you close all pockets on your garments well. Please also zip, button, etc. your jacket/ overcoat on the hanger, so it won't fall off it.

5. Bags and similar items will be handled separately. You will receive an extra ticket for each item.

6. You can pick up something from your clothes and/ or bags at any time! The attended cloakroom is for free!

︎ Concept





Three years ago a strange creature took life in the middle of Revaler Strasse’s Clubland at M.I.K.Z. The story went that BOXIKUS came to WARBEAR and proposed him to do an event following the fortunate wave of the SABOT^°AGE queer-techno party season. As there were two floors in the club and as by that time WARBEAR was living with TOM ASS, who was producing an experimental event called THE DARKNESS, exploring the obscurities of queer culture in a performative way, they all got together under the name of GEGEN.

GEGEN came out without its object (Gegen This, Gegen That), as the concept wanted to criticize the power mechanisms acting in the backgrounds of that monster-notion called IDENTITY. This means that being against something is a very easy position to perceive and identify yourself as, but it’s even a way to give power to your antagonist, who will always stay on top of you by defining yourself antithetical to it. A difficult, but more involving idea of freedom in life is detaching us from institutionalizing powers and finding individual ways to compose an existential project, once our own desire is focused as the goal to reach.

So the question is: Is there a possibility to be free by becoming ourselves, by being PRO our own desire?

The answer is GEGEN.

That was the main-line, whichmade us face and play with all the under-concepts we defined in each event. We started to play with such themes as fears, organs, orgasms, lives, deaths, always with this redefined, pompous and at the same time oblique, self- ironic, strange algebra that would nullify the effects of hidden powers in the construction of reality by being GEGEN the concept of GEGEN itself; so switching the meaning of GEGEN to PRO.

This idea was well defined in the first three events, but we wanted something more. To deconstruct identity we felt we needed some kind of spatial virginity. We needed a suspended space allowing us to de-establish the codified queer entertainment scenarios. In Berlin, since the Wall fell down, the revenge of the East in terms of urban exploration, made the abandoned factories and post-soviet buildings speak for themselves as possible spaces to fill up with cultural production. This “postmodernisation” made Berlin the post-industrial, post-ideological Mecca, fuelled by the explosive ludic drive of expression injected in Western people’s minds after decades of repression. Areas like the Revaler Strasse block became the highlight of independent clubbing, which folded onto itself once this hedonism was ruminated in all its possible marketing ways ever.

We wanted to be free from this necrosis. We wanted to create an impossible space to perform multiplicities so to invite different artists and social groups to experience a new exciting tumble down of the schematic field in which to collocate ourselves as city consumers. This meant mixing everything up: the queer communities in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. The LGBT community of Schöneberg, the artist community of Mitte, the new music and queer scene of Neukölln, the academic scene, all the different scenes from squats to raves passing through the subcultural tuttifrutti. To make this Molotov cocktail explosive, we put it on fire through a special work on body focusing on big bodies, different abilities, intersexualisms, intergenerational relationships, a deconstruction of the heteronormativisation of heterosexualism, as much as the criticism of homonormativity and homonationalism. The method was simple as it dealt with exploring the theme, providing and granting a safe space for it to happen as a personal discovery, through the party. It was already clearly happening in the super codified M.I.K.Z., because of the multiple networks of relationships that all of us had, which found their spaces within the party geography. Walls had to fall down as the central joyful engine of the event. We needed a location that was not just empathic with the project, but that gave to this continuous process of differentiation the right dynamic, letting people confront themselves without the fear of feeling “out of place” as “out” was the “place” to be and feel.

For strange connecting patterns of a collective mind, KIT KAT happened.

We had the possibility to enter the dreamland of a queer family, whose club is a kingdom of a special transhumanity that was queer de-facto as they were working since almost twenty years in the same direction. It was a Big Bang and we were immediately accepted as part of a future Atlantis where musics, arts, sexualities, loves, freedoms and, most of all, the pleasure to perform ourselves outside our own constructed boundaries, would find a spontaneous out-of-time-and-space. This last two years, GEGEN grew constantly, letting different parts of Berlin not just be excited about this performative, joyful, Friday crisis, but to become the open doors to a worldwide connection of travelers, who started to book their flights according to GEGEN dates to be there, be PRO and BECOME themselves.

We wanted it to be a precious moment where everything was curated at its best and that had to be selected as active entertainment, where participants did not fall inside it randomly as an agenda routine read on a whatever free-press, but chose to be consciously there.

We felt invested by one of the biggest live energies ever and we are grateful to all of you for giving us inputs, ideas, fluxes and weltanschauungen to reconstruct them back as an open creative platform making GEGEN an unrepeatable experience. Most of the concepts in those two years came from our public. So GEGEN is YOU, as much as you will be born again and again by becoming yourself through the definition of your own desire.

Memory is not a dogma but a collective mechanism. By cancelling the past and experiencing the present through an already touchable future, GEGEN will live forever when it dies as the memory of it. Let the contradiction explode in a new revealing life in the fourth year of GEGEN.

We wish to thank for those excellent times of beauty and fire all the people who accompanied us. We love you all. GEGEN BIRTH.


Concept courtesy of Warbear
Grafic and video by Stefan Fähler

HOUSE OF GEGEN

DAG ROX ( Crocodile)

LEONARD DE LEONARD (Leonizer)









BEARCAVE

BEARKEEPER (Gegen)


GEGEN  ARTS

MIRON ZOWNIR                    
            

GEGEN PHOTOS: AGHIA SOPHIE & CLAUDIA KENT

GEGEN HOSTING: MYSTI

GEGEN DAMAGE REDUCTION: MANCHECK