In 1987, Carsten Höller visited the Luna Luna amusement park for the first time. Ante litteram museum, the Luna Park was created by entrepreneur, artist and creator André Heller in Hamburg, Germany, and housed fully functional rides and sculptures created by over thirty artists: a Ferris wheel designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a house of mirrors created by Salvador Dalì, a carousel with the radiant shapes of Keith Haring instead of horses. And then the sculptures of Sonia Delaunay, David Hockney, Rebecca Horn, and Roy Lichtenstein. After its debut Luna Luna, which was conceived as a traveling amusement park, closed due to a change in ownership. On December 15, 2023, the amusement park reopened, thanks to new partners and a team led by Drake’s DreamCrew who brought a selection of the original works to the Arts District of Los Angeles, bringing them back to life for the first time since 1987.
“I wanted to build a large bridge between the so-called avant-garde – artists who were sometimes a bit snobbish and didn’t connect with the masses – and so-called normal people”.
Today, Prada Mode – a contemporary cultural series in which visitors can travel through art, music, food, and entertainment through various events created to expand important global cultural gatherings in different locations around the world – presents the third edition of The Double Club, a project by Carsten Höller realized at the Luna Luna Studio in Los Angeles, California. The Double Club is an artistic project by Höller originally commissioned by the Fondazione Prada, opened in 2008 and set up in a Victorian warehouse near the Angel tube station in London: conceived as a dialogue between Congolese and Western cultures, at the time it was born to offer a new space to the public dedicated to cultural simultaneity. The Double Club consisted of three spaces – bar, restaurant, and disco – designed to represent the most challenging elements of both cultures, embracing music, food, and visual aesthetics. The second iteration, The Prada Double Club Miami, was hosted in a film studio complex from the twenties and explored the ideas of duality through a division of space: a monochromatic indoor club space juxtaposed with a polychromatic outdoor tropical garden, animated by live musical performances and DJ sets by international artists and those belonging to the Caribbean and South American diasporas. The third edition, The Double Club Los Angeles, is instead immersed in a site-specific installation based on some of the most recurring themes in Carsten Höller’s artistic practice: the principle of division and the funfair machine within a carnivalesque aesthetic.
“We cross the threshold of this landscape inspired by the idea of infinite divisions in half, a curious wonderland that comes to life in a deconstructed amusement park, with real rides that spin in slow motion and live music to dance the night away: a quest fun in style”.
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