I arrived at The Post Bar for Stimulation: Love (the latest neuroqueer art rave from Stimulation Arts) already intrigued by the evening. Not intrigued in the way a normal journalist might be, clipboard, professional detachment, polite curiosity, but in the way a man becomes when he eats a new and unusual fruit and then discovers it has psychedelic properties.
Tottenham was damp and humming. Buses wheezed past like exhausted mammals. Somewhere a vape shop glowed with the moral confidence of late capitalism. Then I opened the door.
Jesus.
The Post Bar had been transformed.
Fabric hung like nervous systems torn open and reassembled by optimistic surgeons. Rose petals covered the floor. Objects dangled from thread as if gravity itself had signed a temporary ceasefire agreement. Someone had clearly been allowed, encouraged even, to drill directly into the building. There were colours that do not exist in ordinary nightlife. Pink that felt argumentative. Red that insisted on forgiveness.
Co-curator Lil Bolingbroke (one half of Stimulation Arts) had told me earlier that passive spectatorship was dead, that art only worked when people touched it, tore it, lived inside it. A rejection of elitist distance. A rebellion against the polite museum hush. Standing there, coat still on, I realised they weren’t joking. I was already part of the artwork simply by being present.
The evening began gently with Lil leading a tarot workshop, like the opening chapter of a novel that intends to emotionally ruin you later. We stood in a loose circle while strangers handled cards with priest-like seriousness. I pulled The Three of Spades, or maybe it was the Three of Swords, depending on how committed you are to traditional symbolism.
Heartbreak rendered as geometry. I was scared. The Three of Spades. Love as rupture. Something big was in store for me this evening.
DJ Husband and Wife started the music. Their DJ set slid into the room sideways, playful, curious sounds first, exploratory rhythms like someone poking a sleeping animal with a stick just to see if it might dance. Co-curator Drew Thwaites had described the night as a journey through love’s stages: playful beginnings, honeymoon absurdity, experimental intimacy, then darker release. He undersold it.
The bass felt like being gently reorganised at a molecular level. Roman Ackley began his live penis paintings on the stage. We were surrounded by completed instances of his work. Magnificent things. Huge, unapologetic phalluses painted with devotional seriousness. Not pornographic. Not ironic. Impossible to ignore.
Someone whispered, “They’re romantic.” They were. Tender even. A reminder that bodies are ridiculous but also sacred. A corrective to the wellness-industrial complex that insists everything must be toned, filtered and monetisable.
Nearby, Vanloop performed with a hoop, all devilish charm and slow revolutions. Love as orbit. Love as repetition. Love as stimming. Which, according to Lil, is the point, making visible movements and behaviours usually hidden away, reframing them as celebration rather than embarrassment.
DJ Salamander provided their signature scuzzy donk and the room pulsed with collective permission. Lil handed me a marker and directed me toward film strips stretched across an overhead projector. “Draw,” she said. So I did. Projected instantly onto the wall twenty times larger than intended. Art without rehearsal. No algorithm optimisation. No curatorial thesis statement. Just participation.
The last thing they can’t control is imagination, Drew had said earlier. He was right.
Then came the mirror performance. Lil held up a mirror to performance artist Tommy Lee. Reflective surfaces moved in front of the crowd so we kept catching ourselves mid-expression, laughing, anxious, curious, delighted. Meanwhile Tommy stripped down to their underwear, echoing the progression of love from flirty donk-ie fun into something more physical.
EULA began performing. Noise that refused classification. Metallic tenderness. Glitches trying to confess their feelings. At one point I found myself standing by the bar, and suddenly understood with terrifying clarity that this was the beating heart of cool right now.
Not Shoreditch. Not some sponsored warehouse rave with branded cocktails and people pretending to understand Blue Jam. Here. A sticky anarchist bar in Tottenham where strangers were learning how to exist together without pretending to be normal.
Drew’s performance arrived like a warning siren. Messy was promised. Messy was delivered. Food appeared. Cornflower mixed with colour. Nobody knew why. He cowered before us, his audience, like a man recently released from a torture chamber who expects only brutality. The food pots lay in front of him.
Everyone hesitated. Years of gallery etiquette screaming inside our skulls. Then Lil stepped forward, throwing globules of colour paste at him.
A beat.
The room collectively rebooted.
DJ Husband and Wife were moving forward. Without thinking I joined them. Throwing food.
Soon paste flew through the air like a sacrament turned projectile. It was allowed. People gathered around, participating, revelling in the release. They became one mass, casting forth particles of food as Drew recoiled from every projectile.
Mess as pedagogy. Growth through rupture. Exactly as Lil described, learning emerging from chaos rather than polish. Then the music came back. Louder. Faster. Something snapped. People began tearing art from the walls. Fabric ripped. Tape surrendered. Installations collapsed into ecstatic ruin. Animal energy. Pure punk behaviour translated through an electro bloodstream. Nobody asked permission. Nobody needed to.
The audience, the co-creators, completed the work exactly as intended. I watched strangers who had arrived alone hours earlier laugh together while dismantling entire environments. Temporary community dissolving itself deliberately. Love as destruction. Love as letting go.
Distortion closed the night. High BPM catharsis. Sweat everywhere. At some point I realised nobody was checking their phones. No documentation panic. No influencer choreography. Just presence.
Outside, London continued being London, rent crises, culture wars, the slow grinding bureaucracy of despair. Inside, for a few impossible hours, people built something else. A pocket in time. An anarchist experiment in empathy.
I stumbled home at dawn coated in rose petals with the Three of Spades still in my pocket, convinced I had witnessed either the collapse of civilisation or the prototype for whatever comes next. Possibly both.
If love is a mess, and gods help us, it clearly is, then Stimulation: Love argues that the only sane response is to lean into it. Touch things. Break things. Throw food at your problems. Dance until strangers become comrades. Somewhere between tarot cards, penis paintings, overhead projectors and a room full of neuroqueer joy, I realised something deeply unsettling.
The future might not be efficient, it might not be tidy, but it will absolutely be loud.
