Sweat, Screens, and Scirocco: Wolfram’s Rituals of Heat

Some artists chase the future. Others remix the past. Wolfram Amadeus—known mononymously as Wolfram—has spent his career doing both at once, building a dancefloor dialectic where Italo-disco, early rave nostalgia, and post-Internet irony collide under a neon-lit sky. Now, from his new base in Lisbon, he’s expanding that loop, projecting it onto glass façades and rethinking the borders between nightlife and art installation.

From Vienna to Lisbon: The Geography of Play

Wolfram first rose to prominence in the mid-2000s as Diskokaine, a cult figure in the Vienna club scene, known for his unapologetic love of cheesy synths and camp aesthetics. His music was a glitter-slick counterpoint to techno purism—a subversive homage to European dance culture’s most melodic excesses.

Collaborations with Haddaway, Holy Ghost!, and Sally Shapiro followed, along with releases on labels like Permanent Vacation and his own Diskokaine Records. Yet, despite the playful surface, Wolfram’s work always carried a conceptual core: a fascination with identity performance, emotional loops, and the theatricality of nightlife.

In 2022, Wolfram quietly relocated to Lisbon, joining a growing community of nomadic creatives seeking refuge from the hyper-capitalized cultural circuits of Berlin, London, and New York. Lisbon, with its Atlantic melancholy and postcolonial complexity, offered new textures. Here, Wolfram’s practice began to shift—not away from the dancefloor, but into a multi-sensory space where music, video, and public art intersect.

Scirocco Esterno: Wind, Sweat, and Looping Ecstasy

His latest piece, "Scirocco Esterno," premiered as part of the Studio IIII Residency in Berlin but was deeply informed by his time in Lisbon. Named after the hot Mediterranean wind that sweeps from North Africa into Southern Europe, the work is a video projection mapped onto the glass architecture of Potsdamer Straße, blurring private installation and public spectacle.

The film shows young men locked in an endless loop of dance-floor ecstasy, bodies moving to the invisible currents of a synth-driven wind track. It’s a visual metaphor for the heat of nightlife—both literal and social. But it’s also a subtle commentary on climate, migration, and the collective need for ritualized release in an era of permanent crisis.

“Dance is one of the last communal rites we have that’s not mediated by screens, at least not completely,” Wolfram explains. “But I also wanted to project this moment onto the city itself—to trap it between reflection and transparency.”

Club Culture as Expanded Field

Wolfram’s move to Lisbon isn’t just geographical—it’s conceptual. The city’s Afro-diasporic rhythms, hybrid parties, and sonic cross-pollination have seeped into his sets and installations. You’re as likely to hear him drop batida, tarraxo, or slow trance edits as you are to catch him referencing Pier Paolo Pasolini or quoting Instagram memes mid-set.

Wolfram equally invested in moving beyond the DJ booth, treating nightlife not as a product but as a laboratory for new forms of visual and social experience.

“The club was always an art space; it just didn’t need a curator,” he says. “Now, I’m interested in how you can take that same energy into a gallery, onto the street, or into a looped video installation without losing the sweat, the risk, or the joy.”

The Art of the Perpetual Loop

There’s a subtext of melancholic repetition in Wolfram’s work—a love letter to ecstasy, but also an awareness of its fragility. Whether he’s remixing Haddaway or projecting bodies in motion onto city glass, he’s staging what theorist Mark Fisher once called “the slow cancellation of the future.” In Wolfram’s world, the future isn’t gone—it’s just caught in a loop, waiting for a remix that might never come.

And maybe that’s the point. To keep dancing. To keep looping. To stay ecstatic even when the world refuses to change tempo.