Never Alone: 1997–2004 Raving in Europe brings together analogue photographs documenting the nomadic techno-punks that free-partied their way across Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic and beyond. It presents an insider’s perspective from Italian photographers Cheyenne Clementi and Valentina Morandi, who started capturing the ‘teknival’ scene where they embedded themselves during rave culture’s European golden age while they were still teenagers. 'It was our daily life,' Morandi says, 'from organising everything and scouting for venues to setting up the sound systems.'
Morandi and Clementi were young when they met. Growing up, they went to the same liceo artistico, a type of arts-focused Italian secondary school. But they officially met at a rave, back when the scene was smaller and everyone got to know each other. It was a diverse community, united under a shared vision for the future – one of creative expression and freedom. ‘It was an escape from imposed values, that’s how I’d sum it up,’ Clementi says.
Being such a cohesive project, it’s surprising that the curation of these photos, taken nearly three decades ago across eight years, wasn’t initially planned. 'It was simply our way of observing the world and preserving memories of the life we were living.' Clementi explains. Her father was a photographer, too, so 'documenting those years felt natural'. It was only more recently that she and Morandi decided that their tranche of photos was 'historically significant', and that the time was right to share them.
The images are off the cuff. Snapshots of anarchic warehouse partying are paired with quotidian scenes of communal on-the-road living, so that towering rigs and crowds of police intermingle with vistas of camper vans and trucks parked up in forests and fields, and portraits of children playing with their pets. It becomes clear that these diametrically opposing sides of this lifestyle – the ecstatic and the domestic – are in fact one and the same. One image captures the striking, shadowy figure of a dog backdropped by a sky-high soundsystem. In another, amid an eccentrically dressed crowd gathered for an al-fresco wedding ceremony, a toddler is seen sitting on a pair of shoulders.
It was in 1994 that the free-party movement began to spread from the UK to mainland Europe; when raves were essentially criminalised. Increasing police crackdowns encouraged British soundsystem collectives – notably Spiral Tribe and Desert Storm – to spearhead a move to European countries where, in those early days at least, there were few-to-no restrictions. While equipment was at times seized, interactions between ravers and police generally remained peaceful. As Clementi and Morandi recall, it was only following the millennium that relations began to sour. (One photo from summer 2004 captures police disbanding ravers from CzechTek, an annual teknival which, by then, had been deemed illegal.)
Morandi recounts a 'surreal' memory that has since become legend, when in the summer of 1999 police helped to escort a convoy of ravers’ vehicles to the site where their days-long party was due to take place by Lake Bolsena in the Tuscan countryside. 'It’s almost impossible for something like that to happen today without clashes or other issues,' she says, describing the period as a 'magical time'. It’s true that many candid moments documented in Never Alone frames this bohemian way of life as akin to a sort of utopia. 'There was a real buzz, a tremendous energy, and a sense that living life differently was actually possible,' says Morandi.
She adds: 'Nearly 30 years later, we looked at each other and realised we can't keep this just to ourselves. [The photographs] are a piece of history from a movement that has proven incredibly enduring – all from an era before social media and phones, before the obsessive documentation we see today.' Not only representing a formative experience for the two friends and photographers, the images are a doorway to a bygone era – when counter-cultural communities had the freedom to prosper on the fringes and young people felt empowered to stay present in their lives. Never Alone captures the radical beauty of what has been lost, and what collective resistance has the power to reignite.
