Nightclubs as Social Sculptures – An Exchange with PIP’s Steven Van Lummel

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Interviewer: David Bola

Photo Credit: PIP Den Haag

First, what should we know about you and PIP ?

My name is Steven Van Lummel, I was born in 1981 in The Hague city. I'm an artist. I studied at the Royal Academy of Art, and first I became a teacher at Pleysier School and then I started PIP in 2007 with my partner, David Schoch, so that's 14 years ago. And right before COVID, we were doing 120 events a year, 50,000 visitors, five festivals, eight international exchange, like New York, Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo. And now during COVID, we changed our business, we started a book publishing company called People In Print and PIP TV channel, which nobody watches, which is super. And yeah, so that's it.

You switched over to different types of media because of COVID?

In the beginning we did 12 weeks of The Big Quarantine Show. So we made a TV show every Saturday. And we didn't just want to have DJ showcases with a stream or anything, because there was so much, and it just didn't feel right. We did this Quarantine show in which we had sort of a showcase where people could perform , we had fashion designers and new music and it was nice. An...