Disco and the Angolan Cilvil War

To create his latest body of work, Stan Douglas took on the persona of a fictitious nineteen-seventies photojournalist who documents both the disco scene in New York City and the liberation struggle in the southern African country of Angola. Using period clothing, props, and decor, Douglas staged what he calls “fragmentary costume dramas” from these disparate milieus. “The nineteen-seventies was when everything changed,” Douglas told us. “It was a time of the greatest concentration of wealth and the least amount of productivity. What the Angolan Civil War and disco shared, in their earliest moments, was that they were both utopian spaces destroyed by the intrusion of outsiders.”

“A Luta Continua, 1974,” 2012