Saccharum spontaneum is the Latin name of a variety of rhizomatic grass that quickly and unexpectedly bursts out of the ground in otherwise uninhabited soils and silt deposits.
All over the world, people are using urban space in unexpected and innovative ways, contrary to the designed intentions for those spaces. Spontaneum is a forum and an instrument for facilitating these kinds of urban (mis)uses. Spontaneum is a new metropolis that extends the full range of latitudes and longitudes; Spontaneum is always free; Spontaneum is always in in-between and liminal spaces, therefore, Spontaneum is potentially everywhere; Spontaneum is in the tunnels and under the bridges and in-between buildings and in the beach beneath streets; Spontaneum is a dance party in a parking lot; Spontaneum is a fuzzy cuddle puddle in a shipping container storage facility; Spontaneum is a dinner party in an alleyway; Spontaneum is a movie projected under the freeway; Spontaneum is a rave in the trailer of a moving truck; Spontaneum is urban kayaking in the middle of the night; Spontaneum is the pink illumination of shit nobody cares about or notices (like overpasses, power pylons and forgotten factories); Spontaneum is an enclave of glowing bubbles and neon on a drizzly coast; Spontaneum is a purple cloud in a verdant garden; Spontaneum is a hundred thousand communes; Spontaneum disrupts your plans when you stumble across it, because it’s so much better; Spontaneum is a new metropolis that can’t be gentrified because it is everywhere and nowhere, whose rhizomatic roots lie dormant beneath the streets; Spontaneum is a metropolis composed of temporary autonomous zones that spring in and out of existence every night—a city that wakes up when everyone else has gone to bed, and operates a parallel mode of life in and on the infrastructures of the ordinary metropolis. Every 13-year-old Ukrainian kid doing the Drum & Bass step in an abandoned lot or on top of a parking garage is in Spontaneum, and so is every street skater, every warehouse raver, every sideshow, every night market, every bike party; every urban exploration or dérive. But Spontaneum is not everything. Spontaneum is not a party; Spontaneum is not a nightclub; Spontaneum is not a bar; Spontaneum is not a career; Spontaneum is not a pay-to-play, cover charge, need-I.D., paid-for venue; Spontaneum is not for sale; Spontaneum is not a corporate event; Spontaneum has no sponsors, donors or investors. Every denizen of Spontaneum is creative about the way in which they inhabit space and time; when and where they do things; the way that they use private and public space; and, ultimately, the way that they share resources with others. In Spontaneum, anything is possible.