Strike a Pose! On the performativity of musical cultures

It is anything but simple to name the people who move in subcultural scenes; indeed, there is a real linguistic dilemma. In academic texts the talk is often of “members”. But “members”? That sounds like a membership list for a club, along with membership fees and period of notice. “Participants”? sounds like a weekend seminar. “Supporters”? A bit like a sect, no? “Protagonists”? Overly heroic.
But this dilemma itself says a lot. There is no really accurate word for someone who belongs to a scene without having joined it, who is present without having been accepted, and at some point, is no longer there without having quit. Subcultural membership doesn’t function like membership. It is performative. You are part of it by taking part.
Wagner and de Burca take this seriously. In their films they speak of the people as “artists”. They show artists with their own practices, their own methodology, their own voice. Not representatives of a scene, not examples of a style, but actors who are working away at their own visibility.

In “RISE” (2018), a film about spoken-word poets in Brazil, there is a scene in which you see a performer who performs his text and in the same image you see the cameraman filming him and other people who are watching and for their part being filmed. The camera is not invisible, it is part of the social situation. There is not outside from where you could take a neutral position as every glance is already a positioning. This runs like a red thread through all the duo’s works. We repeatedly see screens, monitors, CCTV images. We are both backstage and at the same time in the auditorium, present in the recording and in its processing.
In the book “Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital” (1995) Sarah Thornton described how subcultures are always from the outset conveyed by media. In the early days primarily by flyers, fanzines, album covers, and now also through the Internet and social media. The notion of an “authentic” scene that is only subsequently discovered and then distorted by the media is, she says, a myth. Media are from the outset part of what makes a scene a scene. Wagner and de Burca seem to share this view. Their films do not show subculture despite the camera but through it. The camera is not some intruder, is not located outside but intervenes. It units spaces and times, bonds stars and fans, the individuals, in one group, produces proximity and distance at one and the same time. Here, performing in front of the camera does not simply mean “presenting yourself”. It means behaving in light of an apparatus that produces, increases, and distributes visibility. The elaborate staging of light fits into this. For Wagner and de Burca lighting is not just decoration or the mood-maker, but something that distributes visibility. Anyone standing in the cone of light is present. Anyone who is in the shadows is still waiting.

In “Future of Yesterday” (2026) Wagner and de Burca’s camera immerses itself in the German Straight-Edge Hardcore scene, a subculture that views sobriety as a logical gesture of resistance to capitalism. The camera leads us viewers through different images and settings. An old videotape recording shows a shellac album on a deck; the pickup arm going into action; a red label that rotates. Then, shot in high-gloss, a woman at a self-made silkscreening machine. A garage with toxic-green walls in which a man in a flannel shirt is lovingly polishing the hood of a van with an orange-and-black paintjob. The man and his vehicle are simply there, in matter-of-fact everydayness. The camera pans on and captures a workshop that is choc-a-bloc with stuff and in which someone with their back to the camera plays guitar, surrounded by car tires, a silver helmet, and stacked crates.

These settings and objects are not so many nostalgic props. They are, as Dick Hebdige poignantly said in “Subcultures. The Meaning of Style” (1979) “mundane objects”. Everyday items that through their use become symbols. In this context, Hebdige drew on Max Ernst and the concept of bricolage: the combination of things that do not really belong together in order to generate new meanings. Subcultural bricolage, Hebdige suggests, works like the author of a Surrealist collage: It brings together seemingly incompatible realities and thus generates exciting connections. But bricolage describes not just a subcultural practice; it also describes Wagner and de Burca’s filmic method. They do not just document a scene, they collage documentary and staged, authentic and surreal elements; speed blends with slow motion, sharp focus with blurs. Their films are in Hebdige’s sense themselves subcultural practice. This shows all too clearly that Wagner and de Burca do not introduce these images into the scene from the outside but work closely with the actors of the subculture they document.

The title of their film “You Are Seeing Things” is ambiguous. “You see things” can mean you are hallucinating, imagining things. And it can also mean: You are at long last seeing something that was always there. Both readings apply. These films do not dissolve the documentary into fiction; they take it to the point of absurdity by exposing its conditions. The real appears not beyond all staging but in it. Not despite the pose but through it.
The establishing shot, two profiles in neon, minimum distance between them, maximum tension, thus sets the agenda. It leaves open what is otherwise overly hastily decided. Is this confrontation or intimacy? Authenticity or performance? Document or staging? Wagner and de Burca do not force us to decide. They present subculture not as a spectacle for an external audience, but as ongoing work on your own visibility. It is work that Wagner and de Burca accompany with respect and aesthetic precision without appropriating it.