Fatal Pleasure
Lynnée Denise, Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg

Invited into Studium Generale’s loVe making, Unsettling treats love as a public commitment with real stakes. For us, love is not a mood or a metaphor; it is a way of organising relationships, resources, and responsibility. It names practices that interrupt harm, resist disposability, and build the conditions people need to live, learn, and create with dignity.

Unsettling approaches love as a collective responsibility — measured by what we protect, who we show up for, and what we refuse to normalise. From that position, we host Lynnée Denise and her talk Fatal Pleasure, tracing how Black queer DJs and studio musicians shaped revolutionary sound during the HIV/AIDS crisis, carrying memory, grief, and joy through scenes marked by state abandonment and moral panic.

What would it take for love to be visible in our choices—who is protected, who is resourced, and who is heard?

Fatal Pleasure: The Sound of HIV/AIDS and Other Ghost Stories from the 1980s traces how Black queer DJs and studio musicians forged a radical sonic language in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Moving through New York, Chicago, London, and Johannesburg, this talk listens for the ghosts—those lost to state neglect and moral panic—who remain present in the edits, versions, blends, and dub-inflected manipulations that defined Black queer dance floors during the “Long 80s.”

By activating an archive of mixes, flyers, liner notes, and queer-oriented discographies, the talk uncovers what might be called A Black Queer Sound: a survivalist aesthetic in which pleasure and peril, aliveness and dying, pulse together. It is a story of sound systems, underground institutions, and the politics of pleasure under pandemic conditions, where the turntable becomes both an instrument of world-building and a witness to disappearance.

Lynnée Denise, a global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, is an Amsterdam–Johannesburg–based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Influenced by her parents’ record collection and the sonic experimentation of the 1980s, her work traces the migrations of music and the role of Black electronic traditions in the African Diaspora. In 2013, she coined the term DJ Scholarship to describe how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from party purveyor to archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, Denise’s research explores how sound system culture creates a living archive for the Black queer diaspora.

Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg is about shifting, challenging, and expanding the structures we inhabit because equity can’t live in statements alone. We interrogate how power moves through policy, pedagogy, and “normal” routines, and we push for structural change that makes space materially, socially, and politically for those who have been historically excluded, erased, overlooked, silenced or made precarious. Our work is about making space, not just metaphorically, but tangibly, materially, structurally, for those who are here and those who are not (yet). We work to support existing initiatives while opening up new spaces for voices, minds, and bodies. Our work insists on transformation, not accommodation: shifting structures through accountability, conflict, collaboration, and collective care.

Judith Leysner, co-founder and Strategic Counselor Institutional Development of Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg & Laura Quintero-Soekarnsingh, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Access & Outreach Policy Specialist.
Contact: unsettling@rietveldacademie.nl & website: https://un-settling.com/