The Audience

For a magazine concerned first and foremost with ephemeral sonic practices, it’s valuable to also consider and observe cultures and contexts adjacent to such practices. To put it differently: everything has to do with everything, and it seems legitimate to say that “documenting contemporary music and sounds,” as the description of zweikommasieben reads, basically means “documenting the contemporary.” In this endeavor, photography has always been an important component, and the column “Formations” highlights this complicity. As a visual contextualization of any given topic that zweikommasieben investigates, the column remains open in structure and content.

The second itineration of the column curated by zweikommasieben’s photo editor Flavio Karrer presents “The Audience” by Zurich-based artist Jeff Rossi, which connects to the theme of fandom. The images are screenshots Rossi took of US-rapper Desiigner’s concert at the Frauenfeld festival in Switzerland back in 2017. During the performance, fans stormed the stage, ignoring clearly defined boundaries and upsetting a well-established hierarchy between those who perform and those who attend a concert.

Even though being a fan can be practiced (very) actively, it’s still very much a passive role. Or to put it differently: fans need artists, artists don’t necessarily need fans. In “The Audience” Rossi challenges this dialectic, and he centers the stage-storming fans as a subject worth observing, blurring the line between admiring and being admired. A moment of anarchy leads to a new configuration, in which the rapper slowly seems to be disappearing in a sea of people, becoming one of many and losing his status until order is restored. Until his fans leave the stage, it is Desiigner who’s put in the more passive position.

While the images of Rossi may be but one vantage point on the concert, his subjective perspective is complemented by many other documentarians immersed in the event and visible in the pictures. The fans storming the stage are suddenly in a situation that allows them to take pictures and videos that are distinct from and unique compared to what the official cameras are able to document. A selfie with the rapper, a wide angle shot of the crowd that’s still down below, a surprising new perspective: a co-presence of artist and audience with all of the concert becoming the stage and different realities overlapping. The result is a temporarily shared space in which it is not always clear who is playing which role.