Prada Mode and Luna Luna Host Carsten Höller's The Double Club Los Angeles

For two nights, guests boarded rides as beats reverberated inside the artist’s latest site-specific installation

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
Photography by GETTY IMAGES

Jojo Abot.

On the heels of Frieze Los Angeles, during the weekend of the Academy Awards, Prada Mode tapped German artist Carsten Höller to create a pop-up The Double Club in partnership with neighboring Luna Luna, the long-lost artist-designed amusement park rehabbed by Drake’s DreamCrew media company and staged in warehouse space downtown. The Italian fashion house held two nights of parties on March 7 and 8, headlined by a series of DJ sets and performances by Jojo Abot, Cimafunk, Craig Richards, Arman Naféei, Mimi Xu, La Goony Chonga, DJ tsUgU, Pedro, Bianca Lexis, DJ Reflex, Anderson .Paak, Lil Wayne, and Travis Scott while guests careened through the darkened space via carousel horses, swings, and roller coaster cars.

Joining Höller for two nights of parties were Ice Spice, Hunter Schafer, Nas, Odell Beckham Jr., Letitia Wright, Lykke Li, Camille Rowe, Damson Idris, Milla Jovovich, Gabbriette, Hailey Gates, Machine Gun Kelly, Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert, Giveon, Joey King, Gracie Abrams, Grace and Mamie Gummer, Olivia Perez, Madeline Argy, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Pierce Abernathy, Aja Naomi King, Reece Feldman, St. Vincent, Malu Borges, AnnaSophia Robb, Aminé, Marcos Fecchino, and Kimberly Drew. The concept of the site-specific Double Club installation itself was based on division — halving the space’s footprint and doubling its height — to create a sort of rationality that’s paired with entertainment-inspired dancing evoking the feeling of being alive.

“The conflict between two different things is what I’m after all the time,” said Höller, who explores these juxtapositions throughout his practice by creating experimental installations and sculptures meant to foster certain states of mind. “A Double Club is two different ideas. One is rationality, mathematics and the other is entertainment, something strong enough to make you feel alive, to dance,” he added.

“This is really a nightlife experience,” said Höller inside the pop-up adjacent to the reassembled amusement park with its Jean-Michel Basquiat ferris wheel, Keith Haring carousel, and Roy Lichtenstein hall of mirrors that Höller first visited during its 1987 Hamburg debut. For preservation, Luna Luna remained a look-but-don’t-touch zone while the Double Club’s rides ran on repeat. Höller pointed to the music as the prominent factor in his ephemeral space. “Lights go on and off and the carousel moves. I want you to be taken with the experience so that you lose your mind and at the same time feel grounded, completely rational. I want to take away the middle ground. I want you to feel the extremes,” he added. For the artist, the middle ground is the zone where we spend our daily lives. “If we take the middle ground away, we come into a completely new way of living,” Höller said.