DAYS LIKE THESE

Jens Lüstraeten, 2025

The summer of 2024 came with a leaden atmosphere: oppressive heat, Capitalism on autopilot, a world in constant crisis. Wind turbines that stand still, the last Navalny protests - demonstrations for a future that was slipping away.  

 

Many of us felt a nearly rebellious yet desperate need for summer - to dance against a feeling of disappearance, to swim against the rhythm of a machine that no one seemed to control anymore.

Nevertheless stagings disintegrated, there was hardly an ecstasy in the techno, but rather a proximity to joining the dance around the golden calf - a choreography without redemption.

 

DAYS LIKE THESE blurs the boundaries between visual diary, symbolically charged images and music video. Filmed in black and white it reflects the issued content and feelings with a fragmentary and restless structure. 

 

The soundscape composed for DAYS LIKE THESE amplifies the content with its own means. The opening scene, ballet-like footage of automated processes at a stock exchanges for flowers, is driven by two competing sine curves enhancing the industrial, machine like character of the images.

The following mix of summer scenes, political Symbolic footage and fin de siecle dancing imagery is impelled as well as held back by a bass and curve grounded electronic track that transports a feeling of being stuck or facing an obstacle rather than an atmosphere of freedom or extasy .

 

A wasp, caught in a jar, staggers through the sugar, stings. The Final pan shows a word written on the wall of a destroyed apartment: Love.