Anonymous Club - Pavement

About

Following the launch of Anonymous Club: The Glass Ceiling, which featured LEECH over two prologue performances presented in collaboration with performance directors Boychild and Josh Johnson in September and October, Shayne Oliver (Creative Director, Hood By Air) announces Pavement, the next iteration of Anonymous Club's exhibition and residency at Luma Westbau in Zurich. 

In creating Hood By Air, Shayne Oliver defined the process that now powers Anonymous Club. Since the relaunch of the brand this summer, Oliver's new collective Anonymous Club has operated behind and reached outside the bounds of fashion to collaborate on a residency program for young talent. 

Pavement features the first resident Santiago aka "Santi", a 19-year-old New Jersey native who recently emerged into the NYC music and fashion scene. His musical debut, in form of a video performance, situated within the growing architectural environment is on view from 27 November. Part music video set, part futurist dreamscape or simply apocalyptic debris of retail space and designed in collaboration with sub, the new structural addition inhabits the artefacts of Santi's performance – a custom-made costume and microphone of Anonymous Club design.

Anonymous Club reflect on the current shift in retail, where the store’s significance as an urban phenomenon is based on the notion that the marketplace is the driving force of our cities. In recent years, retail became increasingly abstract, it escaped to the countryside and moved into enormous warehouses closed off to the public, despite their size, invisible to the consumers. Now commodities are predominantly viewed virtually, and we are no longer looking at the physical product. It is the other way around: the product sees us and records our data, while we are passively blindfolded. The act of shopping as a social habit and as a form of public activity is rapidly dissolving. 

Anonymous Club was founded in the midst of this phase of transformation, but instead of acknowledging a crisis of retail, it evolved out of a virtual condition that challenges the ongoing detachment and remoteness through their residency at Luma Westbau. While we are all participating as remote consumers, there is a physical manifestation of something completely abstract. A production site of virtual fantasies. Instead of garments or any kind of tangible commodities, it is a studio inhabited by proxies. 

The architectural environment of the opening project The Glass Ceiling presented a raw structure carrying a ‘glass ceiling’, a display while remaining a void. For the next iteration Pavement, sub introduce a stage for Anonymous Club’s resident Santi, the first addition to the abstracted white space; presented as a cleared-out version of a green-screen set, operating solely as a projection and remotely controlled in Zurich. 

sub’s architectural projects define a distinct aesthetic expressing a certain zeitgeist. Since the 1990s a sensual minimalism has dominated retail spaces and the common notion of comfort. By introducing forms of roughness and challenges into this domain, sub created a kind of baroque subversion of minimalism, drawn from youth culture and exemplified in their work for Balenciaga and the artist Anne Imhof. 

The exhibition and residency is curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.