About a month ago - somewhere mid February - Dancefloor Intimacy, Club Dérive and Montage launched an open call for their ‘Club Access Lab’. Together, in the weekend of the 7-9th March, they would host a workshop on accessible club design - the theme where the practices of the three collectives intersect.
Written by
Tilde De Vylder | 08.04.2025
On the one hand there is Dancefloor Intimacy, a London based ‘movement’ putting a broad understanding of ‘accessibility’ at the forefront of a vibrant nightlife culture. By gathering the lived experiences of clubgoers - a group which bans no disability or neurodiversity - and allowing them to unleash their imagination, Dancefloor Intimacy bridges the gap between research and actionable change, thus between the current - excluding - and optimal - inclusive - situations. In this endeavour, Club Dérive, is the perfect partner in crime. With space as their instrument and by relying on psychogeographic theories, CD's scenographies aim to be more than installations. Rather they are ‘ambiances’ - animated and appropriable settings, resulting from and at the same time stimulating an intense interaction between the objective environment and the individual subject. In the same way CD’s scenographies are not just installations, Montagesevents aim to be not just parties. With every event, Laura Conant and Jonathan Cant - founders of Montage - try to radically shift club conventions: however crazy an idea, it is never too crazy to explore.
On the part of Dancefloor Intimacy, founder Ali Wagner - trained as product and industrial designer, focussing on social and environmental strategies for the nightlife and music industry - is present and organising the workshop. For Club Dérive, Clara Golfa Sambay - an Environmental and Prevention Management student - leads the Lab alongside Ali.
The joint workshop is then a trialogue in which two questions prevail:
a) what does a utopian clubbing experience look like? and
b) how do we build it?
To guide our thoughts, giving a clear direction to the experiment, our answers to these questions are to be translated into concrete design interventions, with the next Montage party in Recyclart - a multidisciplinary art, culture and club space in Molenbeek - as case study.
During the course of three days, we went from reality to utopia and back, balancing options and constraints, weighing out problems and solutions, navigating between past, present, future. The first day was all about establishing the theoretical framework on which to build. Ali laid out some central notions for understanding accessibility and disability: we talked about definitions and misconceptions, learned about the spoon theory and the notion of universal design, pinned the social model of disability against the medical one. (I won’t go into detail about these concepts here, but strongly encourage you to google them.) Armed with this theoretical foundation, we set out to do an in situ audit of Recyclart, aiming to understand the barriers that exist for people with access needs.
Identifying possible solutions for these barriers was the goal of the second day. With a post-it-exercise on how to turn theory into action, Clara guided us towards a collective brainstorm session. Gently we entered the realm of ideas, putting words and giving shapes to our own ultimate utopian club experiences - no scenario being too far-fetched, no fantasies too far-stretched.
On Sunday our rather floaty proposals were to land, in order to arrive at concrete designs with distinct forms and clear materiality.
Joining the workshop was a motley group of about 15 individuals, all as creative as colourful. Many have backgrounds in architecture and art, but there’s also experience in film, theatre, (health)care and gender studies. The multidisciplinary gang also brings with it a multi-layered reading of the world, due to their non-conforming engagement with it.
As a way of reflecting on this workshop, I gathered five overarching insights that struck me throughout the weekend, and continue to stuck with me. By not opting for a detailed report of our work, but rather choosing to share these lessons, I hope to spark your imagination. In this way, the Club Access Lab is an unending endeavour - and the experiment can keep going.
Identifying possible solutions for these barriers was the goal of the second day. With a post-it-exercise on how to turn theory into action, Clara guided us towards a collective brainstorm session. Gently we entered the realm of ideas, putting words and giving shapes to our own ultimate utopian club experiences - no scenario being too far-fetched, no fantasies too far-stretched.
On Sunday our rather floaty proposals were to land, in order to arrive at concrete designs with distinct forms and clear materiality.
Joining the workshop was a motley group of about 15 individuals, all as creative as colourful. Many have backgrounds in architecture and art, but there’s also experience in film, theatre, (health)care and gender studies. The multidisciplinary gang also brings with it a multi-layered reading of the world, due to their non-conforming engagement with it.
As a way of reflecting on this workshop, I gathered five overarching insights that struck me throughout the weekend, and continue to stuck with me. By not opting for a detailed report of our work, but rather choosing to share these lessons, I hope to spark your imagination. In this way, the Club Access Lab is an unending endeavour - and the experiment can keep going.