Abandoned Factories
DANCEFLOORENSICK
![](https://images.prismic.io/dis-art/eb91b5b3-945f-4ba4-9c54-3bacfbc4bfa1_Resize_C6_A.jpg?auto=compress,format&rect=0,0,1600,1140&w=1600&h=1140)
![](https://images.prismic.io/dis-art/eb91b5b3-945f-4ba4-9c54-3bacfbc4bfa1_Resize_C6_A.jpg?auto=compress,format&rect=0,0,1140,1140&w=1280&h=1280)
Riccardo Benassi
Dancefloorensick is a six-part visual mixtape by Riccardo Benassi. Shot at a September 11, 2021 Tanzdemo [dance demonstration] street party protest against nightlife restrictions coinciding with the cancellation of tenant protection laws.
The first film was 1895’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. A reflexive film—documenting the namesake factory owned by the photographic inventor and thus showing their cinematic technology’s prowess—exists in triplicate: truth varies—and, regardless, it’s mostly marketing.
Today we dance in emptied-out factories and warehouses, industrial spaces of a different kind of repetition and anonymity, evacuated by economic changes, unemployment, the entertainment of our deindustrialized labor market.
What role do these party-protest images serve? Proof that images aren’t reality, and that reality is fleeting? That language and music have nothing to do with the retina? We keep watching.