The Garden Against The Current: community activation in London’s grassroots ecosystem with V4ND4N4 (Vandana Dargani)

For young artists in metropolitan centres ‘community building’ seems to be the phrase of the hour. But what does this mean in practice? I sat down with Vandana Dargani (stage name V4ND4N4) to hear her experience of the beauty and deep-rooted challenges that emerge for those putting in the hard hours for grassroots art spaces, and the unexpected necessity of an ecological approach. 

DJ, curator, event producer, and programmer, Dargani also creates opportunities for young people to develop their musical practice. In fact, that was where we met, at a Voices radio-run open decks hosted by Vandana herself. We bonded over our shared love of sober partying, and it was clear from our brief exchange about community facilitation that she had more wisdom to share. 

Dargani thrives on paradox, equally at peace in the quietness of a weekly Sunday hike as she is immersed in a club bassline. She thrives on the hustle and bustle of cities but also in the stillness of solitude and sobriety, and you can hear it in her sound as a DJ - a balance of opposites maintained, I suspect, by a disciplined work ethic. Her understanding of the contradictory nature of sound and identity, is a foundation of her musical curation, but also what strengthens her vocational life as a community educator. Starting out attending Voices Radio workshops, it was an easy transition to working within their community and education projects. Despite the increasing pressure for promoters to diversify their lineups, there is still a worrying scarcity of well-known femme and trans producers. Workshops like those run by Voices and Dargani are the key groundwork that emboldens young musicians of marginalised identities to enter into the seemingly opaque and complex network of self-promotion. 

Vandana is also the founder of SPYC.fm, an idea that germinated back in 2021 whilst she attended fashion school,‘It’s a platform for archiving Earth culture through radio, events and education. In a world where our futures are uncertain, this is an opportunity to time capsule the best things about being alive on our planet today’, she explains. The ethos is a real act of repair. Bridging the sentiment of nostalgia with a fervour for the artistic endeavours of young UK-based artists, it draws our attention to the now. Projects like SPYC.fm are a key antidote to polarising online forums like Instagram and X that are a pressing kryptonite for young creatives fighting the isolation of pricey cities through screens. 

Hot Girl Sh!t is a shining example of this in practise; its success, a rousing marker of demand. It saw a blossoming collaboration between V4ND4N4 and 3o6, an independent fashion label that transforms waste into wear, founded by Jennifer Rojas (known to Dargani as Jen). Happening on November 14th of last year, the night featured a runway, styled by the team, alongside DJs, MCs, and live performers, all filmed on one unifying dancefloor by A Peng Production and Noah Chulu Chinn. 

The words get thrown about a lot, but Dargani drives home the point that she saw then ‘what I would really say is a safe space. . .  everyone brought friends and family too, it was wholesome and something I will never forget’. Illuminating her deep sympathy for contrast she reflects on the nature of event production and adds, ‘that’s very different from DJing as a craft – sometimes it is a lonelier experience’. An ecological approach to her work is clear from our conversation. Dargani is constantly locating herself in a wider network of interdependent research:

‘I have seen so many womxn around me come into power with the embodiment of their artistic talents. DJ AMB is a talent I met a while ago through an On the Rise activation, she had great taste and skill, I booked her for SPYC.fm before it even became what it was, now she runs her own platform in Nottingham, Zimmii, and honestly it’s culturally beneficial - to see more womxn and people in general, truly grow in their authentic voices. Like gardening, I think we have a lot of work to do to create more third spaces that are safe for the heart’. 

The image of the garden is also clear when she speaks about finding her sound as a selector and curator, placing herself amongst a range of multi-format influences: the genre, Ghetto Tech; Sherelle’s 2019 Boiler Room; the collaboration between Emma Warren, author of Dance Your Way Home and Elijah’s Yellow Squares; Jyoty’s event Homegrown; record label, art collective, and radio show Love in the Endz. She describes herself as a ‘continuous student’ of London’s rich history and the indelible shaping of diaspora on its culture. It is from this seat of open-minded study and constant adaptation that Dargani is carving out spaces for the development of young musicians: 

‘I think finding a sustainable, ethical, and independent business model can be challenging. I am not saying I know what to do, I think we’re all trying to create novel and unexpected ways to be involved in capitalism and experimenting – you can see that in the way there are more interesting techniques of creating content around promotions, or more events that combine things like skating and DJs, or even our new upcoming series of IRL events, Earth People.’

SPYC.fm is another garden of Dargani’s devoted grassroots work. As well as a platform and radio station, for the London-based DJ, it is also an enterprise in world-building with a concern for the planet at its heart. She imagines SPYC.fm as a living and breathing archive for the arts, planet-based, multiformat, here and now. In her words: ‘[documentation] for our descendants’. It only makes sense then, that the launch of the station’s physical broadcasting space will take place at Things Matter CIC later this summer, a community-led non-profit organisation that supports emerging sustainable talent. In resonance with Dargani’s work cultivating young talent, the organisation prioritises the act of maintenance as much that of creation, offering workshops to local communities in mending and up-cycling, as well as in creative skills. 

Following the lead of SPYC.fm and its collaborators, we can look to the interconnected nature of our planet in the way we organise grassroots community work. In doing so, we might learn from an earth system which makes no distinction between the creation and the maintenance of collective talent, and offer education and artist development the same status as the lineup or the performance. Like Vandana, we can learn to experiment amongst the seeming opposites. 

Put simply, her work leads to ‘a rich and genuinely better entertainment scene’, one that resists the hollow commercial drives of corporate promotion companies. It’s hard to pin her work down to just one channel of activity, but that’s the point. Human stories are interconnected and shifting, and we should demand that the language of our cultural ecosystem reflect this. Whilst corporate marketing tends towards the stagnancy of reliable branding, emerging collectives like SPYC have capacity for the unstable electricity of the young designers, artists, facilitators, and musicians facing life as it stands today.

V4ND4N4 - @v444.mp3

SPYC.fm - @spyc.fm

Written by Izzy Walter