Streetwear brand Weekday hosted an exclusive experience during Paris Art Week unveiling a one-of-a-kind art installation developed by the creative collective jtf × ĒTER. Enter the MEATRACK: an intimacy engine made of suspended, swinging bodyrooms constructed from a single loop of denim. Held at Le Consulat Voltaire, a former electricity substation in the 11th arr., this site-specific installation establishes spaces of constructed intimacy. The MEATRACK is a piece of furniture, a topography, and a strange site of haptic play.
La Grande Dame and Broodoo, among others, played sets as guests were invited to explore MEATRACK and each other through touch, isolation, reach, and inward gaze.
The “MEATRACK” could be first experienced during a one-night-only special event. How did the installation come to be?
The MEATRACK is a creation of the collective jtf × ĒTER – a little crew of minds and makers that spans the likes of architecture and space-making to writing and performance. The installation represents a territory in which we overlap – the result of a symbiotic, promiscuous collaborative process.
For people who couldn’t experience the installation IRL, how would you describe it?
It’s a piece of furniture, a topography, a strange site of haptic play – a suspended, swinging intimacy engine! The structure carries twelve bodies in a single loop of cocoon-like bays, which position you (as the meat on the rack) in a system of autonomous ‘rooms’ that swing interdependently. When you move, you move another. When another moves, you are moved.
Within each bay, you’re strapped in and held by the rack. Zip-lined arm holes allow you to reach through your bay, where you can touch the hand of a body positioned next to yours. Your head, which rests in the inner-circle, can see the faces of others in the rack – but not the whole person. The performative gesture of the MEATRACK is simple: what does it mean to be embraced by a vast weighted blanket, in which all you can do is touch, reach, and retreat, gazing out and inwards? Some people find it deeply unsettling; some find it incredibly comforting!
The MEATRACK was unveiled during Paris Art Week. What made you decide to do it then?
Paris during Art Week is a hive of humans who are on the most part self-aware, critical, and observant. We were interested to see how people might engage with something that was conceptually slippery – not strictly art nor fashion, not an exhibition in the typical sense or easily categorized. The MEATRACK is spiky yet soft. It doesn’t conform to standards proffered by contemporary art; it’s offering something less specific and far more playful. Some people have described it as a monumental seat, a bed, a (sex) swing, a prison cell, a work of art, a piece of design. The truth is that it’s all of those and none of them.
One of the ideas behind the installation is that of collective intimacy and shared experiences. Do you think people are more isolated today?
Each of us is catching up with the ways in which traditional spaces of intimacy have unceremoniously evaporated. New structures have been generated in their place but the vocabularies they speak sometimes feel to be in a completely different language. The swinging rooms of the MEATRACK represent cycles of interdependencies that hint towards this flux, inviting you to experience something very intimate among strangers. We believe that the (re)construction of any and all possible intimacies demands serious imagination. Who doesn’t want to regress to a sack of meat from time to time?!
How do your personal histories inform your artistic vision, and how do they influence your perception of the world and society?
We have a very fluid, responsive study of emerging structures of collective intimacies. Whether it’s by way of an exhibition or in a conversation, imagining and constructing dedicated spaces for shared experiences often reveals something unpredictable. We’re fascinated by the power of simple shifts in scale between the body and architecture, or a t-shirt and a room. The MEATRACK is a collective garment as much as it is a spatial installation, as disconcerting as much as its materials feel familiar against the skin.
What is the MEATRACK ultimately asking of us?
To acknowledge that we are more than individuals at a moment in which isolation and independence are the given, unchallenged narrative.
