The Rave (2016)

‘The Rave’ (2016) is a two-channel video and stereo sound installation and part of the project ‘Ain’t Got No Fear’ (2016), which Mikhail Karikis created with a group of teenagers who are growing up in the militarised industrial marshland of the Isle of Grain in South in Kent (South-East England). The overall project comprises a single-channel video installation, a photographic series and the two-channel video.

In response to the isolation of their village and the lack of space for teenagers, in the last few years, kids and young adults have been organising raves in a local green enclave in Grain. After developing a rapport with the teenage organisers of the dance parties, the artist Mikhail Karikis arranged with the young people to go to film their event. The party was raided by the police soon after it started, a dispersal order was issued and all music equipment and rave decorations were removed from the wood. Having no means of public transport to leave the area, the youth were stranded. After the police’s departure, they returned to the rave site to light a fire, listen to music, socialise and sleep together until the following morning. Focusing on the youths gathering around the fire, Karikis’s two-channel video presents glimpses of teenage experience and use of space at the edges of industrial urbanity. The overall project reveals a way in which industrial sites are often re-imagined by youths with a form of spatial justice defined by friendship and play, the thrill of subverting authority and evading adult surveillance.