To freelance within the arts is to engage in a drawn-out, sadomasochistic dance; not unlike the townspeople of 16th-century Strasbourg, whose limbs were overcome with psychosexual rhythms during a two-week Dancing Plague. Though church records might attest otherwise, the city’s mass hysteria wasn’t a result of demonic possession, but a collective mania caused by late payments and “juste chasinge” letter-exchanges. “Boring jobs, odd jobs, bullshit jobs, and underpaid jobs,” as Mara Mckevitt says, all of which have coloured her experience as a young filmmaker in New York, taking up residence in her “dreams, fears, and sexual fantasies”.

Some 600 years since that summer of (disco)ntent, Mckevitt notes the power relations of employment correlate to that of a BDSM contract, “navigating terms of service, termination, punishment, and ownership”. That unique dynamic, which she explored in a video installation at LA’s Chateau Shatto, goes some way to explaining her upcoming film – Boss Gives Employee Facial – which has been billed as “a horny class critique” by model and artist, Naomi Mcneil who appears in a photoshoot for an accompanying capsule collection housed at Café Forgot, a fashion boutique in New York. Set in a glum Hype House-cum-We Work, where residents are stalked by hidden cameras and two-way mirrors, BGEF will follow one of the company’s receptionists as she becomes an unwitting guinea pig to a new biotechnology, allowing users to feel other people’s orgasms. Narrated in corporate jargon – all synthesising”, “trail-blazing”, and “factory spirit” – the trailer has been spliced with groans, moans, and flashes of pornographic imagery, as Mckevitt scrambles “fine art, film, porn, and fashion”.

“The film will be in dialogue with attempts to merge film and hardcore,” she says. “If Deep Throat asked ‘How can we have sex after Freud?’, maybe BGEF asks ‘How can we have sex after surveillance?’” In imagining a sexual dystopia where only the rich can afford to live without constant observation, Mckevitt squares consent against labour, technology, and class. “I have often found the ‘erotic’ to be unsettling and the ‘unsettling’ to have an erotic effect, so I wanted to push this overlap to a more literal expression,” she says, employing a supporting cast of dongles, screens, and adaptors that are only a slightly more extreme rendering of where we are at now. Stylistically, Mckevitt’s use of technology blurs the line further still. “The criteria for what’s considered porn, editorial, and narrative film is increasingly slippery, so we’ve used DSLRs, body cams, phones, and security cameras, which imply varying levels of value, intimacy, and authority from cinema, to vlogging, to POV pornography.”

The amorphous nature of the project was what first caught the attention of Café Forgot, with McKevitt and Vita Haas (a co-founder Café Forgot) hashing out a collaboration over lockdown walks. “It’s an opportunity to engage in more radical material than a typical shoot,” Lucy Weisner, another of the boutique’s founders, explains. “We’ve noticed the mainstreaming of porn and porn aesthetics, and we think Mara’s project stands apart both conceptually and aesthetically in its discussion of work, pleasure, and identity.” As it stands, BGEF is currently in pre-production and McKevitt is selling off individual artworks based on the production process, which, alongside a line of Café Forgot merchandise, will feed the film’s funding. She calls these “speculative artefacts for a speculative fiction,” comprising trans-inclusive thongs stamped with phrases like “boss”, “resident”, and “redacted”; each one referring to different rungs on the film’s class stratum. It’s a bit like what Marvel would do – selling video games and action figures – only, Mckevitt’s doing it before the film has even come out. 

As pre-production evolves, Mckevitt will produce new artworks connected to the film, which makes sense, given that BGEF is literally based on the sale and exchange of content. “The film is selling itself in order to acquire appropriate financing for its production.” Or, as Weisner puts it, “they offer an introduction into the world of the film and present the pre-production process as an autonomous artwork.” In an era when OnlyFans can ban, and reinstate, adult creators in a heartbeat, Mckevitt is exploring the monetisation of desire through the medium itself. BGEF is not so much a critique on porn’s parlay into pop culture, but an estimation of where the convergent forces of Big Tech and an insecure labour market will corner its creators. 

Shop the capsule here.