The Museum of Trance

Jake Nussbaum hosts a short interview with Henrike Naumann and Bastian Hagedorn, the creators of the Museum of Trance, followed by an hour long curated set of 90s German Trance Music! The museum project flips the "exotification" of vodou trance culture on its head by creating in Haiti a museum exoticizing German club music.

About the Museum and the Haiti project the creators write:
As our concept for the 4th Ghetto Biennale we want to set up The Museum of Trance in Port-au-Prince, an unfinished part-fictional museum on the history of electronic Trance Music from Germany. The conceptual starting point for the concept was the interest in vodou drumming and the stages of trance that people get in while practicing it. This form of trance is something that is lacking the religions practiced in Western Europe. But in the early 90s Trance Music evolved out of Rave Music and Acid Techno. This hard, fast and spheric new genre tried to capture an ecstatic spirituality that otherwise is very rare in Western Europe, especially in Germany. We want to see what happens when the Haitian practice of spiritual trance clashes with German Trance music culture. We want to discuss the representation of Haitian culture in German museums by exoticizing German rave culture and by musealizing it as "the other" in the middle of Haiti. The museum is unfinished, as if the investors lost their interest before finishing it. Due to that this museum will be open to be explored and taken-over by the local Port au Prince artists and musicians. The traditional institution "ethnological museum" is appropriated, deconstructed and re-interpreted and transforms into a post-colonial experimental playground.

Growing up in Eastern Germany, Henrike Naumann experienced extreme-right ideology as a predominant youth culture in the 90s. Her work reflects on the history of the right-wing terrorism in Germany as well as on today‘s broad acceptance of racist ideas. She is interested in the mechanisms of radicalization and how they are linked to personal experience and youth culture. She likes to explore the friction of contrary political opinion through the ambivalence of personal aesthetic taste. In her immersive installations she combines video and sound with scenographic spaces. In her most recent works she widened her focus to the global connectivity of rap music and the reversion of cultural othering.

Born in the northernmost part of Germany with drum sticks in his hands, Bastian Hagedorn began playing the drums before speaking his first word. From a young age, extreme music was a big influence for him and as a teenager he played in his first metal band. Always looking for new sounds, he started exploring the possibilites of composing electronic music. As his alter ego GTUK, he was a german pioneer of the new genre Nintendocore in the early millenials, casually pushing it to its limits. He loves inventing new sounds and expanding the boundaries of what the ear expects. He has started to work on participatory installations that melt his musical composing skills with his background in social work. Currently playing in a black metal band, a free improv combo and an acid rave formation, he enjoys orbiting in a post-genre universe.

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