Temporary Pleasure designs ephemeral spaces that reimagine club culture as we know it. Growing up in and around his family’s nightclub in Ireland, founder John Leo Gillen soon came to the idea that nightlife isn’t fixed; every clubbing experience should comprise a series of one-off moments that cannot be repeated.

Over the last few months, Temporary Pleasure has been working on Joyride, one of eleven installations on display as part of the Barbican’s Feel the Sound. Open now, Joyride – part sculpture, part dance floor – transforms four salvaged cars into a spatial sound system, recalling the Y2K boy racer culture that was Gillen’s entry point to dance music.

We spoke to the Temporary Pleasure designer ahead of Feel the Sound’s opening – the following interview took place inside The Latin Lowrider, one of the four Joyride cars.

Rosie Lowit: Could you tell me a bit about Joyride and the initial thought process behind these car sound systems? I’d love to know more about the boy racer culture that informed this.
John Leo Gillen: I had the initial thought a long time ago. I’m from a very rural part of Ireland, a couple of miles outside of a small town. I grew up obsessed with boy racer culture during the early 2000s: the aesthetics behind the subculture, the cars, this idea of hypermasculinity, but also campness. This was also my entry point to dance movement. Before Internet DJ culture, it offered the experience of creating and sharing music. 

This has always been a very personal thing that I’m into, and a lot of projects in the past have been playing with queerness and boy racer culture. When I started Temporary Pleasure to do more architectural projects, I took a break from it. It felt super low-brow or tacky, and didn’t fit into the approach of how I was doing spatial design. However, these themes were always there in the background, and I saved this idea of doing a mobile rave, inspired by rave convoys, during which you’d find out an address and drive to the location. I love the concept of the cars themselves becoming the sound system; you could arrive, park them up in a circle and this space would become a dance floor.

I wanted to do it for ten years, and I proposed it to so many different projects but it just never happened. When the Barbican invited me to be part of this exhibition, they explained they had the car park space, and I was like, “I’m not even going to develop another idea. This is the one.”I wanted four cars with systems entirely built from scratch, and in turn, I think this piece has taken a lot of everyone’s energy and time…

“I grew up obsessed with boy racer culture during the early 2000s: the aesthetics behind the subculture, the cars, this idea of hypermasculinity, but also campness.”

RL:  How did you come up with Temporary Pleasure?
JLG: My family business was a nightclub in Ireland. I grew up there; I used to sleep there as a baby. I then worked there during my adolescence, collecting glasses, working on the bar and then in management. The club then closed; basically every nightclub in Ireland has closed over the last twenty years as part of a wider trend globally. I’ve spent my whole life imagining a different kind of nightclub. When I got into raves, I started dreaming up something in between a rave and a club. Something very constructed and physical, but also temporary, designed like architecture but experienced like a rave. That’s kind of where the idea came from. It’s been a long exploration of this concept through different projects.

“You could arrive, park them up in a circle and this space would become a dance floor.”

 RL: And what is it about this idea of a temporary space that appeals?
JLG: Clubbing is supposed to be temporary. That’s the whole essence of being a club, it’s this in-the-moment kind of feeling. If you go to a rave, there really is that sense that this is never going to happen again. It’s a shared experience that happens for just as long as you’re in the space. That’s a feeling you don’t really get in a purpose-built club that you go to every Saturday. It obviously has its own benefits, but all of the best stuff in history is based on temporality, and then things get formalised or commercialised. For me, that’s the point where it loses the magic. At the same time, a permanent club is better than a complete lack of club culture, which is the binary that we’re stuck in now. 

“Clubbing is supposed to be temporary. That’s the whole essence of being a club, it’s this in-the-moment kind of feeling.”

RL: What’s the significance of bringing this practice of reimagining nightclub spaces to a cultural and educational institution like the Barbican?
JLG: Bringing Temporary Pleasure to the Barbican is a dream. When I got the original emails I didn’t want to seem too keen, to reply too fast! It’s amazing, I’ve never worked on a project before that has so many resources and people behind it. Usually everything is very DIY, and so this is on a different level to anything we’ve ever done before. We had a month to install, normally we have two days!

RL: Can you tell us more about building the cars?
JLG: I knew it had to be four cars, a four-point sound system. They were originally going to be rented cars that already have in-built sound systems, which is the approach I would usually take, not building anything from scratch. But this didn’t make sense in the context of a formal exhibition where there are going to be thousands of people coming through; nobody would rent me their car for that amount of time. 

Building them became a really fun, ridiculous expansion of scope. We worked out what we could get our hands on for the budget, whilst trying to make each car very different. Each one is tuned in collaboration with a different label or artist to represent a different car or music subculture – The Boy Racer, The Tuner, The Lowrider, The Bimma. We asked ourselves how far we could go with the concept, how we could make four crazy cars that aren’t just four speakers, but more like characters or sculptures.

Joyride, as part of Feel the Sound, is currently showing at the Barbican until 31st August 2025.