“When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”
Meatropolis by Nicholas de Monchaux
[B]oth images represent a system of commonly understood distinctions, rendered in order to negotiate the body of a complex system: the city, the (bovine) body. Just as we need arbitrary designations to govern the path of a knife, or palate, around and through the body of the cow, so we need neighborhoods to negotiate the dense tissue of the city. And just as cuts of beef change to suit custom and fashion (who remembers the silverside, striploin, or clod?), so do neighborhood boundaries and designations … But while a new fashion in meat cutting doesn’t actually change the cow, urban neighborhoods exist in constant interplay with the city’s living flesh. The negotiable boundaries of neighborhoods are necessary divisions for the city’s self-reflection, even self-organization, but they connect as well as divide […] The most arbitrary line in both illustrations might be the outline separating organism from ecology. In this light, our two maps, Meat and Manhattan, are not so different after all.
From meatpaper magazine, our “window into the fleischgeist” of everyday life.
- Anne