Energy Flash – The Rave Movement
(c)videostill: Courtesy of the Artist and Cabinet, London
Perhaps Leckey’s best-known artwork, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999, is a meditation on late-twentieth century youth and dance cultures in Britain. Over its fifteen-minute duration, the work edits together a collection of mainly found video footage and audio, charting a lineage from northern soul to acid house and rave culture. It evokes the ambience of these movements through moments of slow-motion, repetition and snippets of sound that encapsulate the memory of such experiences. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore rather tenderly captures the energy of the collective dancing, as well as something of the socio-economic conditions that existed for such urban tribes. We see people dancing, displaying themselves in the unselfconscious ways that existed before social media changed societies towards our now more image-conscious behaviour. Leckey has placed the work on YouTube, free for anyone to use as they wish.