Dancing around the Counterculture

During the sixties a strong social and political environment fostered a fertile production of objects and spaces identifiable as a radical countercultural wave. Some decades later, these same entities have been read with different eyes and were absorbed by pop culture as younger generations icons. New users switched the original objects character - because of many social and cultural transformations happened between the 60s and the 80s - : mainstream culture manipulated original radical assumptions and products. Clubs, cafes and other cultural venues were approved with softer dignity, missing their “fighting character” in favour of a more aesthetic direction. Pietro Derossi imagined and realized radical dance clubs and design objects during all the 1960’s. Projects like “Piper” club in Turin (1966), “Altromondo” in Rimini (1967) and the design masterpiece called “Pratone” (Gufram, 1966), pointed out an artificial, ironic and contradictory image. The same architect was not only a designer, but he also managed one of these countercultural circles - designed by himself - for a few years in the end of the sixties, participating in the organization of the cultural palimpsest. A friendly talk with the architect will outline the boundaries of this story, from its first purpose until the pop appropriation. Through this interview, Derossi’s production would tell us about the apparently conflictual relationship between counterculture/radicalism and pop. How do some examples of hardly politicized works become exactly their own antithetical models? Is this the consequence of a complete adherence with some fertile pop’s archetypes?