Sonia FERNÁNDEZ PAN

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Sonia FERNÁNDEZ PAN

Participating Project	Curator Residency Program
Activity Based	Berlin
City / Place stayed	Tokyo
Period	2025.1 - 2025.3

Purpose of the residency

Departing from the Fueiho law, which since 1948 imposed strict regulations on Japanese nightclubs, and the Let's DANCE movement, which actively worked to amend this law in 2015 and its repressive actions, I would like to relate with practices of resistance and political imagination of dance culture in Japan. The Fueiho law appears in my book "Edit" as a rumour and an element that allows for different speculations related to the global suspension of dance culture during the pandemic. It also becomes a theoretical stimulus for imagining community forms that are based on pure presence, togetherness, elusive knowledge and emotional synchronicity. From here I would like to produce a spoken essay that includes different voices and experiences, from lawyers who managed to make dancing a right, to musicians, artists and others connected to the Tokyo club scene. With them I would like to think about alternative realities from the ethics and politics of dancing in times of systemic crisis and violence. What stories does dance tell us? What can we learn from dance floors about community making? What is the potential of these ‘sensitive utopias’ in an age of political instrumentalisation of feelings and escalating violence? In thinking of dance gestures as a commons, what are the moving gestures that enable alliances between people?

Plan during the residency

• I would like to contact members of ‘Let's Dance’ to talk about the Fueiho law and the social and political achievements of their movement.
• Through friends, musicians and collaborators from previous projects, I would like to get in touch with dj's, musicians and club dancers for a series of recorded conversations to work with.
• Holding a gathering with artists from the Tokyo scene and the TOKAS residency to identify areas of contact between club culture and artistic practices in order to think-speculate-plot together.
• Sharing my research from the dance floor and related projects.
• Research Tokyo's prolific, multi-genre electronic scene.
• Production of a final audio piece (podcast format)

Creator Information