March 2025
Meat Factory:
and why we need
more spaces that
don’t give a fuck
Meat Factory is a space for raw performance that oozes from the twisted and urgent impulses of Evelynn Yan & Hannah Grove’s duo collective Primary Witness.
We need more spaces that don’t give a fuck. Not because nothing matters, but because everything does, too much, all the time. Because the arts are drowning in approval-seeking, perfection, curation, and formatting. Because to make anything real, we first have to stop performing palatability.
We need spaces where things can rot, where nothing gets wrapped in grant-speak or professional gloss. Where the sweat hits the floor before the bio is written. Where someone sobs mid-score and someone else eats chips in a leotard and no one tries to fix it. Where we practice being with the trouble, with the mess, with each other, with what can’t be resolved in a funding cycle.
Meat Factory is one of those spaces.
It doesn’t give a fuck, in the most tender, rigorous, necessary way. It doesn’t give a fuck about your resumé. It doesn’t give a fuck about institutional timelines. It doesn’t give a fuck about art that can’t bleed.
But it does care... like ferociously. It cares about the immaterial stuff. About presence. About bodies. About the unformed, the almost, the still-becoming. Raw experience.It’s not anti-institution, it’s just not waiting around to be seen by it.
It’s already doing the thing.
It’s already making kin, not career.
Meat Factory is what happens when you stop applying and start showing up.
When Mommy’s not answering your calls, so you mother yourself with movement, noise, and ritual.
We need more of this.
More unpolished, sweaty, possibly uncomfortable, beautifully un-strategic spaces. Spaces that take art seriously enough to not sanitize it. Spaces that hold experimentation like a sacred animal : wild, half-domesticated, a little dangerous.
So no, we’re not being cute. We’re not building our brands. We’re composting them. We need more spaces that don’t give a fuck because there’s a whole generation of artists with too many ideas, too much feeling, and not enough places to be real.
Let’s stop waiting.
Let’s create.
For the sake of exploration.
For the sake of unknowing.
To trust and ride our impulses.
And experiment. Experiment. Experiment.
This text was written while trying out wigs and wrecked high heels, putting together Meat Factory : Mommy, first presented independently and then as part of Fringe Montreal