Do you think you’re better off alone?

For our fifth UTOPIA commission, we invited Rowland Hill to present her ongoing fan-project 'Interesting Times', a body of work that forges links between the cultural artefacts of 1990s Eurodance and Britain’s current relationship with the European Union.

Emerging in the immediate aftermath of the Berlin Wall, Eurodance was born out of a short-lived period of no-borders solidarity that fuelled the ‘golden era’ of Western Europe’s underground scene in the early 90s. For her presentation, 'Do you think you’re better off alone?', Rowland offered a speculative reading of the dance music from this period and beyond, looking at how its rhetoric — an ambivalent blending of doubt, hopefulness, euphoria and emergency — might portentously reflect our current political crisis. Signposted by tracks, video clips and album art, the talk also considered the dance floor or ‘the zone’ as a mythological, extra-temporal folk-space of private and collective fantasy, projection, psychodrama — and possible utopia.

The artist presentation is available on this page to watch below, along with fan collages and an interactive playlist for you to enjoy at home — feel free to add any songs you think are missing off Rowland’s playlist! The talk is subtitled for accessibility and audio descriptions have been provided for each song. Please feel free to leave feedback on the shared