Machines of Love (For Your Safety)

Expanding Jenkin van Zyl's new project for GI, Machines of Love (For Your Safety) reconfigures a set of drawings related to the film installation. Shown here as a set of flight safety cards, these drawings depict a series of trust-building exercises negotiated by a herd of doppelgängers. Gridlocked in a constellation of anticipation, melancholia and possibility on a hallucinatory aircraft runway, these players pivot on the pressure point at which barriers between the original and the copy, between self and other, collapse.

Machines of Love (2020/1) was a hallucinogenic horror which lured us beneath a decaying Viking film set into a casino of buried aircrafts, continuing Jenkin van Zyl’s process of guerrilla filmmaking in abandoned Hollywood film sets. A sextet of ghouls arrive here on the promise of a Good Fantasy, setting in motion an erotic game of destruction and renewal. Caught in the Machines’ lottery of role-play, they breed cakes of their own likeness into the fuselage: a rush of passion that ends, inevitably, in a grisly conclusion. Attentive to the mutability and rotation of roles, the film free-falls through the terror, excitement, panic, and anticipation held within self-creation in a rumination on the enduring power and politics of fantasy.