Afterglow
A Speculative Artifact Depicting Disco’s Lost Future
Sandcast steel, torched outside and mirror-polished inside: disco preserved against the night 50,000 people burned its records.
On 1979’s Disco Demolition Night, 50,000 people packed Comiskey Park to destroy disco records. Early disco founders likened it to book burnings for its racial and homophobic overtones. Afterglow imagines disco as a relic unearthed after that destruction: a steel case, sandcast, milled, and welded, its exterior left rough, scratched, and torched, its interior polished to a mirror. Four figures are bead-blasted onto the polished walls: Larry Levan, Sylvester, Grace Jones, and Nicky Siano.
Afterglow asks: what were those demolitioners trying to destroy that night? How did they succeed? How did they fail? What future might we be living now if disco had kept growing?