Made from archival footage from British television, Fiorucci Made me Hardcore offers an incursion into the sphere of subcultures associated with various dance movements from 70s to 90s England, through a montage that resembles sampling, punctuated by image stills and slow motions. To the images of young people accustomed to Northern Soul, carrying out the same dance steps in a repeated manner, succeeds shots of frenetic dancing shot in Acid House raves from the 90s. A single character dominating the illuminated city appears from time to time on the screen, disturbing the atmosphere of the collective nocturnal hysteria of raves within the confines of utopia and disenchantment, traces of the fragmented subjectivity of its protagonists. The soundtrack freely mixes musical extracts, sound effects and vocal resonance: in reference to the subculture of the Casuals, a group of Hooligans from the 80s whose clothes style 'sportswear chic' aimed to hide their identity from the authorities, a voiceover successively lists the names of their favorite brands, from Ellesse to Sergio Tacchini, from Lacoste to Fiorucci.

Beyond the documentary value that Fiorucci dons regarding the foundations of the collective identity of British Youth subculture and the social construction of its actors (a preoccupation that is found in all of Mark Leckey's works, coming from Liverpool himself) the video offers, from the viewer's perspective, the experience of immediacy and the present. Despite the temporal distance that exists between the viewer and the images spaced out over three decades, the montage and the soundtrack focus on the direct and transcendental experience of music and dance. In this sense, Fiorucci resolves the paradox of the 'representation of the present', simultaneously involving a state of perception whose point of origin is found in the present moment and a moment of return on the past – time of the representation.

Frédérique Baumgartner
Translated by Mia Stern, 2021