Janice Lau

'The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the twentieth century has resulted in an increasingly surreal world.'
 - JG Ballard

China 2012, waste leather was discovered to be used in the making of pork dumplings.
UK 2013, horse meat from Romania was found in British beef lasagnas.

The contemporary meat production machinery is a mind-blowingly complicated affair. Cheap meat travels the world through a globalised food network, where it is incrementally processed, before ending up on our plates. With a beginning and an end stretched so far apart, the journey becomes virtually invisible.

My project starts with a simple question raised by Sir Paul McCartney: what if the slaughterhouse had glass walls?

The proposal combines the typologies of a slaughterhouse, a museum and a boat. Together they become the Atrocity Exhibition. The itinerant slaughterhouse follows the established global meat route. It reveals as it provides. Its architecture curates an experience that makes the slaughtering process public while amplifying its theatrical quality.

The visitors and the workers play both the observed and the observer, and what used to be a taboo now stages itself as a new attraction in Central London. Transparence begins to perform: once stripped of the screens behind which we collectively conceal it, can the meticulous barbarity of industrial meat production remain in the blind spot our consciousness? Far from expecting a surge of vegetarianism, it probes our capacity to further banalise it and soon to enjoy it as an urban entertainment.