Day Is My Enemy was a special live programme presented by Open City Documentary Festival in collaboration with Anagram during the festival’s 2017 edition in London. The project explored how music subcultures—particularly rave, soundsystem, club, and underground urban scenes—have shaped the social and spatial identity of the modern metropolis through documentary and archival practices.

The programme centred on a live audiovisual event that combined rarely seen moving-image archives with an original live musical score created in collaboration with musicians, transforming documentary material into an immersive performance experience. Its themes focused on youth culture, nightlife, resistance, collective memory, and the relationship between music scenes and urban power structures, examining how subcultural communities reclaimed city spaces and influenced wider cultural life.

The programme also connected with other festival events examining queer culture, sound systems, and alternative urban histories, positioning documentary not just as cinema but as a participatory and performative medium. The outputs of the programme included live screenings, archival film presentations, collaborative sound performances, and expanded documentary installations that blurred the boundaries between film exhibition, music performance, and cultural historiography.

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An archival video montage created for one of the installation works.

Photography, Film, Archive Curation

Archiving and cultural production through participatory lens-based media practices.

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