Culture
Take An Audio-Visual Journey Through Italy’s Abandoned Clubs
Discotex is a multifaceted documentary that explores Italy’s ‘80s disco mania.
Discotex—a combination of the words “discotheque” and “urbex”—is Domenica Melillo’s nine-month-long documentary journey through Italy’s abandoned nightclubs. She took photos of old-school haunts like Ultimo Impero, Cafè Solaire, The Marabù, 7Up and East Side—all spaces that closed in the ‘80s and ‘90s—and turned the images into audio using the software program Audiopaint. According to the artist, the reverberations created from this exercise were intended to represent the sounds that played inside each abandoned disco during its glory years. “I’d wanted to create an exhibit for the blind for years,” she told Noisey. “I always asked myself how I might manage to show my photos to those who can’t use their eyes—the only way was to make my photographs speak.” Check out a preview for Melillo’s project below and see her collection of photos from the clubs here.
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