Party Studies: Home Gatherings, Flat Events, Festive Pedagogy and Refiguring the Hangover, Vol. 1

The party as a model for new forms of togetherness, with examples from communist Hungary and Spain

From social get-together to scenes of delirium, this publication aims to unpack the party as a complex, vertiginous construct that provides a dynamic view onto questions of community. If the party functions as an intensification of togetherness, what lessons might it provide in negotiating a given social order?

This first volume on the topic considers the house party, and in what ways domestic space is reworked in support of an extension of the family unit. Including a series of interviews with those active in flat events in Budapest during the communist regime and today, essays on hospitality, the politics of rest, and erotic knowledge, and documentation on Sala 603, an informal house-theater in Curitiba. The publication is the first in a new Errant Bodies series developed in parallel to a set of party-workshops initiated by the artist Brandon LaBelle held in different locations in Madrid, each of which performatively investigates states of partying, posing the party as a scene of study.