Pig Club (2022)

Pig Club (2022) was shown at Modern Art Oxford in April 2022. Pig Club is a new sound work that explores the voices of sex workers in the legal space. Latchem captured her live performance in the former prison cells of the Clarendon Building in Oxford City centre where sex workers were historically interred awaiting trial in 'the rooms underneath the building' (see performance, right). The words spoken by Latchem in the basement are the expletives shouted by the women on their arrest, found in a local archive. Some townspeople objected to these arrests contesting that they were made based on a women’s appearance alone. The performance also includes the words of an anonymous woman in the 1980s who acted as a scout for the notorious Bullingdon Club, whistleblowing an account of their treatment of women and prostitutes, a more contemporary account of degrading activity. The forthcoming part of Pig Club will see an intervention into one of the all-male drinking clubs, at which the sound work will be played. Porcine references found in the altercations during the prostitutes’ arrests, resonate with a more recently reported incident in the all-male clubs involving a dead pig’s head.  The resonant frequencies of the artist’s voice recorded in the underground chambers produce abstract sounds and music and are layered with the artist’s words that are given purposeful, anonymising distortion. The artist sings the chord D minor, the dominant frequency of the voice in the cells, and sounds are collected from the site itself of metal sticks on barred windows to form a dynamic composition.