At the start of the millennium, photographer, hot air balloon pilot and bon vivant Victor Spinelli was in Ibiza when he met Mike McKay, promoter of the famed Manumission club night. Offered the chance to document it, he stepped into the fray. Some twenty-five years on, he has published Spinelli’s Manumission (2026), a coffee table book that looks behind the scenes at the performers and celebrities who built the reputation of a night renowned for excess.
For the uninitiated, Manumission was less a club night than a weekly theatrical production staged for thousands. Born in Manchester in 1994 and reborn at Ibiza’s Ku, soon renamed Privilege, the following year, it ran until 2008 on a scale that still sounds invented: live performance, staged spectacle, and a cast that treated excess as a craft. Spinelli puts it plainly: “Every Monday night was the equivalent of mounting a full theatrical production for ten thousand people” (Spinelli 2026).
The reach and influence of Manumission (1994 to 2008) are hard to quantify. Recollections vary, and attendance figures stay largely unverified. Around 10,000 clubbers are said to have passed through each week (Dazed 2026), with some accounts claiming peak nights as high as 13,000. What endures is the name, and the sense that it marked the 1990s invention of Ibiza as a hedonistic commercial vehicle for young Europeans.
Have the times changed? Would it work now? The question is not purely hypothetical: the decade is enjoying a revival, with Tate Britain’s The 90s: Art and Fashion (2026) currently on show (Tate 2026), and a Manumission night has returned this year. And yet, the abandon Spinelli photographed existed in a world without a phone in every pocket, where a night could happen and vanish, unrecorded. A book like this may be the reflective kind: not a plan to bring the party back, but a way of feeling what it gave and what it cost. Perhaps Gen Z will step away from millennial self-consciousness and reach for that glittery, unpolished time before social media. What is left are joyous images from photographers like Spinelli, who capture the spirit while keeping the vibe intact. As he explains:
“I gave myself a mission. I locked onto the showgirls, fifteen of them, and followed them like a shadow for a full twenty-four hours. From four o’clock Monday afternoon to four o’clock Tuesday afternoon.”
Spinelli’s Manumission (2026) documents his time at the club from 2001 to 2006. A time when its budgets and crowds ran bigger. A time when the scope of the party seemed almost unfeasibly extravagant, yet also carefree and light. Leafing through the 200 pages of his photographic art book, the reader is carried along by visions of sweaty youth, Balearic exuberance and a pervasive showgirl aesthetic.
“I’ve long held one guiding idea: shoot for people a hundred years from now. Leave evidence behind. I wanted these images to feel timeless, as though someone in the future could look at them and truly feel what this was. Everything had to be real; no staging, no second takes, yet with a fashion sensibility layered over it. I came to call it Camera Vérité: truth, but with style.”
The book succeeds because one feels the energy and backstage camaraderie of those occasions where a place, through peak experience, becomes the centre of the universe. A place one wonders ever truly existed as it does in these pages. Photography is an edited, authored, creative act after all.
This is one luminous side of the story. Parties of this sort issue an inevitable receipt of regretful hangovers and the long journey back to ‘real life’. Spinelli does not dodge the obvious charge either. Sexuality, he has said, was “front and centre, and by design,” and the question of exploitation “more complicated,” the performers “driving it, owning it, creating it”. Whether the lens liberates its subjects or consumes them is left to the critical viewer. In these carnivalesque photographs the circus never reveals its clowns, the beautiful stay beautiful, and from sundown to sundown the party never ends.
Spinelli’s Manumission (2026) is available at victorspinelli.com/victorspinellimanumission. Spinelli’s Studio 55, a Trebuchet partner gallery showing local and international artists, can be viewed at studio-55-gallery.com.
Bibliography
Dazed 2026, ‘This book documents the wild times of Ibiza’s most infamous 90s club night’, Dazed, viewed 9 October 2026, <www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/70947>.
Spinelli V 2026, Spinelli’s Manumission, Studio 55, Ibiza, viewed 9 October 2026, <www.victorspinelli.com/victorspinellimanumission>.
Tate 2026, The 90s: Art and Fashion, Tate Britain, London, viewed 9 October 2026, <www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/the-90s
Photography by Victor Spinelli © Victor Spinelli 2026
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
