Hello Irini, John & Stan, I’d like to start by asking this: When was the last time you were at a dance event/party and felt that fleeting moment of joy and unity, feeling of being one with others, in the perfect place at the perfect time. Is it such a fleeting and temporary matter for you?

There are many moments, but one that feels particularly relevant to your question is when we visited DecorAtelier in Brussels last summer. If you're not familiar, it's a meanwhile space and in Jozef Wouters words "a memory of all its previous incarnations...a place where spaces can appear and disappear, where temporary spaces can become realities quite easily."

When we visited, Arnaud de Wolf was installing two laser devices on a rotating overhead scaffolding structure, just for one night. As their curator Marie Umuhoza put it "We move with the energies, asking 'What's here and what can we do with it?"

Temporary Pleasure bears a very strong statement. It claims that “clubs are broken”. What exactly led you to such a belief? What are your ‘broken’ experiences personally?

Since 2008, over two-thirds of club spaces have disappeared globally. In Ireland (where Temporary Pleasure was born) it's closer to 90%. The reasons are complex and diverse, but as clubs were commercialised many became detached from their roots as DIY, temporary spaces, and we'd like to see them return there. We all grew up in the hangover of the Superclub era, so we are only now beginning to destroy and rebuild.

How was Temporary Pleasure born and how did you guys meet? What were the initial steps and activities?

John started Temporary Pleasure, having grown up in a family nightclub business, watching clubs disappear, and thinking about different ways to build clubs. John and Stan connected through an interest in temporary club architecture while constructing a stage for Horst a couple of years ago. Irini and John met last year in Barcelona while studying a masters in 'Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces', and we went on to design our first workshop there.

At this workshop, titled ‘What Makes a Club?’, you have designed and built a club in a warehouse in Barcelona together with participants from around the world. Tell me a little bit about the event.

We wanted to test our idea of building a club in collaboration with the local community through a participatory workshop. We found a disused warehouse with an understanding owner and agreed to clear out thirty years' worth of rubbish if we could use it for free afterward. In 5 days, we designed and built a prototype club with 20 workshop participants, a queer community center, and a carpentry atelier. We opened the club for just 10 hours, featuring a local line-up and queer femme headliners. Then, it was gone.

Do you think you have fully transformed an abandoned warehouse into a club? Is it actually possible to build a club for such a short time?

This comes back to our question – What makes a club? – for some, it's a space of bricks-and-mortar. For others, it's the music and activities the club is home to. A third view is that space and sound are less important than the ideas, politics, and ethos shared by the crowd. We believe that a club is a delicate harmony, and even a temporary club can have all three.

In terms of bricks and mortar, we had a shell, with no water or electricity. We let the participants decide what was needed to make it a club, constructing catwalks, platforms, swings, balconies, and temporary walls.

So what does actually make a club in your opinion? What do you consider to be the most essential parts of a good club?

The Space, the Program, the Ethos. All three, reinforcing one other.

I am curious about your experience with Horst festival in Belgium.

Horst has been a long-time reference for Temporary Pleasure because of the architectural and ephemeral approach to the festival's space design. John met Stan working at Horst in 2018, and Stan currently works in the festival's architecture team. We were also lucky to have Mattias Staelens, one of the festival founders and director of architecture, as a guest speaker for 'What Makes a Club?' So you could say we are friends, collaborators, and admirers of Horst. Our big sister maybe ;)

You are now working on a longer-term project – a 6-week pop-up spot in Dublin – which should open in Dublin. How is the scene in Dublin and how will this space differ from the one built in Barcelona apart from the length of its existence.

Temporary Pleasure is rooted in the Irish context and born from the nightlife crisis. In 2000, there were 500 nightclubs in Ireland. Today there are less than 100 due to outdated late-night licensing laws (The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935) and property markets eroding the city's cultural infrastructure. It will be designed and built in collaboration with local communities that have lost their clubs. So the new club will reflect the Irish scene the same way our Barcelona workshop was representative of the Barcelona scene. While it's planned to last only six weeks, the whole project is a workshop in DIY space-making, so we hope it will be just the first of many new spaces.

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Follow Temporary Pleasure on Instagram.
To learn more about the project, join our Talks programme in Prague on April 15th.

As a part of Gravity Prague #1, the team of Temporary Pleasure will organise a week-long workshop with goal to enhance spaces of Ankali club in Prague through a participatory design process with a group of participants from around Europe. The resulting installations and interventions will be presented to the audience during the Gravity Prague #1 [clubnight] on April 15th.