Fools and Their Folly

Of all the defamatory charges lodged against Marie-Antoinette in the lead up to the French Revolution, one of the most outrageous was that she and her entourage would “play at being farmers” in Versailles. The newly-crowned queen was allowed an escape from the formalities of court life at her small chateau of Petit Trianon, which was gifted by her husband the King, along with dominion over its surrounding gardens. There, she would build an architectural folly imitating a rustic English hamlet that included a working dairy, a fisherman’s cottage, stables, a pig sty, a sheep pen, and a hen house. 3hd’s grand “Fools and Their Folly” club night at Berghain & Panorama Bar mirrors this rural idyll for entertaining aristocrats, in its equally exclusive and emancipatory space of musical, social, and physical experimentation—by order of the Queen.

The closing event of Creamcake’s “Let Them Eat Cake” festival program creates its own Grand and Petit Trianon gardens for a decadent rave, celebrating the pleasure of a place where electronic, pop, and club sounds converge. As a semi-public gathering where otherness is honored in pursuit of self-determination and alternative realities, the “Fools and Their Folly” night of music and dancing embraces the challenge of conveying such vibrancy and non-conformity from a decolonial, hegemony-critical, and queer-feminist perspective.

Performers and DJs like Bloodz Boi, CLIP, Jubilee, Sarahsson, Sarra Wild, and Tokyo Hands & Larry will take over the two floors of the former heating plant, drawing back from the popularization and cooptation of club culture to its roots in the unique parties and boundless sexual and social freedoms that Berghain has long symbolized. In it, New York-based DJ and producer Goth Jafar employs a recurring motif of enchantment inspired by hyperpop and black doll figures, and experiential artist münki arrives from the same city to present a conglomeration of childhood nightmares, rap, and demon art exemplifying androgynous punk. Necessary positions within a global music scene come from Shanghai’s 33EMYBW,  and México-based Argentinian artist and N.A.A.F.I member TAYHANA who brings the club Latinx rhythms. London’s felicita deconstructs traditional elements of folk culture through pop and electronica, and Chilean-Swedish DJ Dinamarca’s inter-genre sonorities situate themselves across different cultural contexts. Iraq-born producer based in Toronto, E-Saggila, and Amsterdam-based Latvian Himera bring the hi-energy, whether through industrial techno or PC Music.

Etymologically, the word “folly” is derived from the French folie, meaning “foolishness.” Also called an “Eyecatcher” in architecture, Marie-Antoinette’s pastoral folly was an equally extravagant series of humble buildings erected to suit a fanciful taste. As an homage to a counterculture that began in an escape from, before becoming a part of the mainstream, 3hd’s “Fools and Their Folly” club night ensures that Berghian—like the Queen’s Hamlet—is still a safe place to hide.