Politics of the Dance Floor: Transmission in Conversation

Archiving Cultures.

In this current edition of "Politics of the Dance Floor: Transmission in Conversation" Sarah Farina and Kerstin Meißner are in conversation with Joana Tischkau from Deutsches Museum für Schwarze Unterhaltung und Black Music and Daniel Schneider from Archiv der Jugendkulturen.

We talk about the importance and challenges of archiving and preserving culture, clubs as cultural spaces and how we can all contribute in keeping memories alive and creating more inclusive art and cultural spaces. The conversation is in German, we will publish a transcript shortly. Please get in touch if you have ideas, questions or recommendations.

Joanna Tischkau is a choreographer and performer who works as a freelance choreographer, dancer, community dance artist and movement facilitator and has performed her works at the Tanzplattform Deutschland 2020, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Danshallerne Copenhagen and Hebbel am Ufer Theater Berlin. Joana is one of the founding members of the "German Museum for Black Entertainment and Black Music (DMSUBM)", Germany's leading museum for Black culture, popular music and history. The museum houses a comprehensive archive of records, magazines, autographs and memorabilia, which are exhibited in a lively place of mediation and discussion of Black history. Through a digital tour of the museum, visitors are immersed in a movement that has gathered stars from Mola Adebisi to Tic Tac Toe to Sydney Youngblood. In their juxtaposition, they attain a new visibility so that similarities and differences in the staging strategies of the stars as well as the receptions of the German audience become the topic.

Daniel Schneider has been a staff member at the Archiv der Jugendkulturen e.V. in Berlin since 2010, where he is heading the project “Pop- und Subkulturarchiv International” at the moment. Together with the illustrator Tine Fetz, he annually publishes the calendar "Places Berlin" about lost places of Berlin club and subculture. The Archiv der Jugendkulturen was founded in 1997 as a non-profit association with the goal of giving source materials and documents from different youth and subcultures like punk, techno, metal or graffiti a home and making them accessible to the interested general public. Through the years, it has assembled one of the largest collections on these scenes in Germany (with more than 55 000 publications to date, including magazines, flyers, posters, records, photos etc.). Besides that, it is active in the fields of citizenship and cultural education, cooperates with universities, museums and other archives and organises the Queer History Month in Berlin. At the moment, Archiv der Jugendkulturen runs a crowdfunding campaign in order to support the continuation of their work in their current location. Please support them if you can.

We definitely recommend following their work, once possible again you can also visit the immense archive of youth cultures in Berlin. You can find all mentioned people, projects and songs in the links below. If you would like to contribute anything to the archive or collection of DMSUBM please reach out to them!

In this episode:

Archiv der Jugendkulturen: (Instagram)

Crowdfunding campaign

Internationale pop and subcultural archive

Index of free archives (West-Germany and the GDR)

Deutsches Museum für Schwarze Unterhaltung und Black Music (Instagram)

DMSUBM – Black Voices – White Producers. Gespräch mit Lori Glori & Sarah Farina

Each One Teach One - Vera Heyer Archive

International Bibliography of African Popular Music

Stolen Moments - Namibian Music History Untold

Heidelberg Project Detroit

Motown Museum Detroit