Kerstin Greiner
Exhibition “Techno Worlds”

“Dancing ist the warmest Jacket”

Dancing is the Warmest Jacket – Original Rave Fashion and Clubwear as well as Techno Magazines from the Nineties, curated by Kerstin Greiner, with Susann Seyfried 
 
For the exhibition TECHNO WORLDS, Kerstin Greiner has curated original techno fashion and media from the 1990s techno scene in Germany. To do this, the former rave organiser and editorial director of the techno fanzine Der Partysan searched through numerous cellars and warehouses with former companions, borrowing from fashion archives and former owners of rave fashion and clubwear labels. Thirty lenders from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Hamburg and Mannheim provided shoes, trousers, jackets and T-shirts from the nineties for four “ravers”, life-size figures styled in original nineties fashion in transparent “barrels” hanging from the ceiling. The “barrels” evoke time capsules or the “Beam me up, Scotty” transporter from the science fiction series Star Trek – a little reference to the techno scene’s affinity for technology and the future – but also of shower curtains, as a reminiscence of clubs and raves, where it was always cramped, sweaty and hot. 
 
The clothes, which are up to 30 years old, were mostly worn at raves and in clubs by passionate techno lovers, and some of them have attained cult status. 
 
The curated techno fanzines from the early nineties, some of which were published beyond Germany’s borders in the USA, Japan, Hungary, Switzerland and Austria, show the graphical genesis and development of media designed by techno fans, also bearing witness to progressive mechanisation, an irrepressible will to create and boundless devotion to techno music and the scene. 

We would like to extend a big thank you to the lenders for their contribution to the TECHNO WORLDS exhibition. We introduce them to you here:

Biography

Kerstin Greiner is a co-founder of the Partysanen (“Partysans”), a Munich techno event producer and DJ booking agency, and co-published Partysan starting in 1994. Partysan was the first techno fanzine in A6 format in Germany. Through a franchise system, the Partysanen expanded the zine’s circulation to 14 issues across ten countries. The crew organised events like Rave on Snow, Rave & Cruise, Sunflower Festival, Thaibreak. Greiner was the editorial director of the Munich edition of Partysan for several years. This overlapped with her time studying communication sciences, sociology and psychology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, completed with her master’s thesis: “Fanzines in the Techno Scene – Market, Production, Audience.” Today, she is an editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and lives in Berlin. Her reportages have received various awards such as the Deutscher Journalistenpreis, the Deutscher Sozialpreis and the Emma-Journalistinnen-Preis.