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Doing Popular Culture

The Gothic or black scene, as it is called in Germany by its members, emerges in the late seventies in England, as progressive bands from glam rock, industrial and post punk develop new music genres. The musical experience goes hand in hand with constantly renewing aesthetic representations, lifestyles and attitudes which, according to current understanding and state of research, form a very heterogeneous social and cultural field.

 

doingpopularculture

 

The project "Doing Popular Culture" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) focuses on today's black scene under aspects of performance research. From a deconstructive perspective, the project first asks about the processes by which the scene is generated performatively, interpreted and transformed in a discursive way. How are collectively shared interests, similarities and conflicts negotiated that create a material, physical and symbolic order and thus constitute a common space of experience?

The starting point of the research is the asymmetrical comparison of three events, which are exemplary for the cultural performances of the scene: the Wave Gothic Meeting in Leipzig, the Amphi Festival in Cologne and the M'era Luna in Hildesheim. The events form the largest gothic and alternative festivals in Germany and attract between ten and thirty thousand visitors each year. They are very different in their spatial-material constellation as well as in their popular cultural and cultural-industrial context. The project proceeds from the assumption that these events, typified by typical events, form the performative framework in which the scene is created in hybrid practices, constantly changing in a self-referential and reflective way. These negotiation processes, according to the basic idea of ​​the project, take place centrally on a physical, sensual and emotional level of concrete spatially and temporally bound experiences.

Essential topics of research are not only the different forms of communitarisation and their scene-constituting processes, but also their materialization. Here, the body as an instrument of subjectivization is central, raising questions about the manifold, sometimes ambivalent stagings and aestheticisations, i.a. in terms of gender and age.

In this context, the project also addresses the importance of the atmosphere that shapes the timeliness of experience, bringing aspects of sensuality and emotion into the research horizon.

Furthermore, the project focuses on the many options for action and asks for possible contradictory forms of appropriation of cultural-industrial formulated offers. Even the conflicts within the scene as historically grown, and also politically highly differentiated field are focused in the course of field research and analysis.

The project group conducts research in a microperspective and actor-centered manner, whereby primarily ethnographic findings and narrative interviews, as well as the analysis of media texts, video and video documentation, the organizational structures of festivals and their cultural-industrial significance form the basis of the material.

The project not only contributes to performance research in the field of cultural anthropology / European ethnology, but also to popular culture, everyday culture and scene research. The aim is to present a cultural analysis of performative practices in the context of communal events and to understand them in all their complexity.

 

Project leader: Prof. Dr. med. Markus Tauschek ()

Associate: Nikola Nölle M.A. ()

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (duration: 2017-2020)