NIGHT SOYL

Building on work first presented at Brasserie Atlas in October of 2022, Christopher Beauregard continues in the use of precisely cast and honed forms to furnish a symbolic lexicon of recurring themes and objects; candles, baguettes, the passage of time. What emerges is a looping narrative with an internal logic that connects the decrottoir* with the collection of night soil*, and arrives at a scatological metaphor for a model of trickle down economics.

To create the title Night Soyl, Beauregard has adopted, then adapted, the titles of two films, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Soylent Green (1973). The two films depict a world that is pre (but near) apocalyptic; a world at the precipice of societal collapse, undone by cannibalism. One film is the portrayal of late capitalist dysfunction and ecological ruin in the near future, the other, a depiction of the dead rising up as zombie-like creatures to infect the living. Importantly, both films are concerned with and connected by the violation of a taboo; humanity consuming itself. It is a theme that resonates throughout the exhibition - an economy of limitless growth that exacts unlimited sacrifice. Here, Beauregard is interested in a collective desire for technological progress and the accordant wealth and abundance that it should herald. It is a contradiction that is simultaneously marked by precarity and a qualitative scarcity of time.

*The decrottior is a curious architectural fixture common to the facades of Brussels. Embedded at the very threshold of buildings, they coincided with the emergence of well heeled pedestrians in a city still propelled by animal labour. Their original function has long been forgotten as the material conditions of the city changed through the decades. Now a sort of vestigial appendage, what remains is an absence, a built form devoid of purpose.

*Night Soil is a historically used euphemism for an economic relation and sometimes agricultural practice, principally enacted before the advent of plumbing and sewage systems. A tidy solution to the disposal of human excreta, workers employed in the trade would empty chamber pots and cart away the contents of privies. On occasion, this material would be passed along to farmers, to be used as agricultural fertilizer.

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