CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - JIM DONAGHEY 'Laughing in the doorway of the apocalypse': biopolitical evasion/resistance in punk festivity (K-Town Bike Wars case study)
'Bike Wars' is a spectacular component of the annual K-Town hardcore punk festival in Copenhagen. Mutated and distended bicycles, welded and bodged together from scrap parts, are created during the festival to be used for jousting and destruction derbies. Since 2002, this absurd sporting contest has occupied public space to conjure a low-budget Mad Max aesthetic (Miller 1979 – a similarity noted by the festival organisers), and the apocalyptic theme is evident on posters for the event, too, declaring that 'The End Is Near' (K-Town Bike Wars infopage). But these bike punx are not the guzzoline-worshipping 'War Boys' of the Mad Max apocalyptic imaginary – twenty-first-century punk typically includes 'radical environmentalism' as part of its anarchist-informed ethos (Ruggero 2009). Indeed, the punx of K-Town eat vegan food (K-Town Bike Wars infopage) and Bike Wars itself is an expression of bicycle culture within contemporary punk. However, the bicycle (as symbol of the conspicuously eco-conscious consumer/citizen) is simultaneously celebrated yet also defiled and ultimately destroyed here. This détournement resonates all-the-more strongly in the 'cycle-city' of Copenhagen. This project takes the K-Town Bike Wars phenomenon seriously as a case study of biopolitical evasion/resistance – through participant observation and innovative co-creative ethnography with the bike punx, key themes to be explored include:
- embodiments of punk apocalypse and 'no futurism';
- festivity as escapism, evasion and/or resistance ('laughing in the doorway of the apocalypse');
- nihilism as a liberatory response to catastrophe (a refusal to be 'disciplined');
- performative barbarism and occupation of public space as incursion/interruption.