Purple Magazine
— The Cosmos Issue #32 F/W 2019

joep van lieshout

art JOEP VAN LIESHOUT ideas for alternative living… dystopian projects on how societies collapse and disappear… and back-to-basics survivalist systems that function in nature  interview by KAITLIN PHILLIPS  KAITLIN PHILLIPS — What was SlaveCity? JOEP VAN LIESHOUT — SlaveCity was a utopian or dystopian project in which I created a city for 100,000 female and 100,000 male slaves. You need about 23 square miles for 200,000 people to be completely self-sufficient and sustainable. I made an urban plan, designed the buildings and systems, asking myself ethically unanswerable questions: how can we deal with the efficiencies or deficiencies of humans? For those not capable of working in SlaveCity, how else can we make use of them? The obvious answer is to recycle useless humans — to transplant organs, consume their meat, make compost or biogas out of them. Basically the project was the most extreme Excel sheet that you can imagine…

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