Aggression is a thorn of energy lodged in our tissues. In danger, the body compresses it like a spring — storing force for a single explosive bam–bah! of self-defense.
Living in society, we suppress our animal instincts and inconvenient feelings. But they never vanish; they either burst out or quietly injure us from within, turning us into neurotic, unpleasant creatures.
Energy follows the old rule: it cannot disappear, only transform.
People once believed you could release aggression “safely” by pounding pillows, but newer studies suggest this only amplifies the emotional mess.
So we tried something else — not releasing aggression, but transforming it into rhythm, music, and dance. The oldest human mechanisms of togetherness, brushing the burrs, bugs, and dried-up beliefs out of our collective fur.
The idea has a long timeline. The first version appeared in 2013: a huge architectural structure covered in punching-bag-keys. We prototyped it in Sri Lanka and showed it on a local beach.
Half a year later it reappeared in Berlin at Panke during Russian Contemporary Art Week — upgraded, polyphonic, more mischievous.
Then it lived at our gallery in ArtPlay, and later at Outline in 2015. With each iteration the concept shed its skin and grew a new one.
Eventually we moved away from a forest of bags and multiplayer chaos toward one single soft bag, one sensor, and a personal psychedelic ritual.
From the childish notion of “turning aggression into music,” to a more mature concept inspired by zoologist Konrad Lorenz.
From tapping on pre-recorded sounds, to a system where you can record your own — and use the sounds left behind by strangers.
The final version is a full ring with soft mats, a control panel with two buttons (record and random), and an embedded microphone.
Its name ICI ON DANSE is not decorative — it echoes a historical sign once placed on the ruins of a political prison demolished by accumulated public rage. The violence had finally burst, and on its ruins people began to dance.
We learned the hard way that public installations in Russia rarely survive long.
When we created our light-sound landscape “Tyki-Piki Forest” in a non-central Moscow park, some gorillas used it as a toilet, others tried to dismantle it, others opened beer bottles on it.
At first we were heartbroken. Then we realized we should use this superpower for the people — not fight it.
And that’s how the concept of street toys meant to be broken was born.
Breaking an artwork in a way that generates new meaning turned out to be technologically hellish, so we simplified:
the installation must be hit, and hitting it must generate content.
A trick so cunning it intimidates even the most stubborn destroyers:
If you want to kill the artwork — don’t touch it.
If you do touch it, you become part of it. Not a vandal, but a collaborator.
And what self-respecting vandal would willingly put on the hideous bathrobe of an artist?
We invented a near-perfect self-defense system — an evolutionary leap. Even venomous fish spines or fungi that turn ants into zombie slaves are less effective than this organism’s new weaponry.
ICI ON DANSE is a ritual machine: aggression turned into rhythm, destruction turned into creation, and strangers turned into dancers.