Trade Safe Chastity Box

Trade Safe Chastity Box is an interactive architectural device that serves as an event platform, open August 7 - October 2, 2025, at the Materials & Applications Storefront in Los Angeles. The Box invites visitors to play with various intimacies while on public display, remixing architectures of surveillance.

Los Angeles is a city built to watch itself. The imaged body–idealized, fragmented, glowing—circulates endlessly on screens from the theater to the security control room. Beyond the screen, the city can be a hard place for the irl body. We must navigate a landscape engineered to repel and police. Defensive design structures public experience: Benches with spikes. Empty lots fenced off. Cameras that pierce everywhere. 

Trade Safe Chastity Box mimics these logics of surveillance and alienation. But instead of policing the body, the installation invites the body in—to flicker on a screen, to bump into another pulse. Surveillance devices typically deployed to police our public places—like CCTV cameras, floodlights, peepholes, and safety mirrors—are instead deployed as media for collective hiding and revealing, transforming M&A’s street-facing venue into a performative alleyway that gestures toward the city’s buried histories of cruising, of glances traded in plain view. Within Trade Safe Chastity Box, bodies are neither surveilled nor a spectacle. Visitors perform for cameras that don’t report, only reflect—they flicker and glitch, uncontainable and alive to each other. 

The installation will serve as a dynamic set piece for a series of public programs that engage topics of queer identity, public space, and contemporary politics, in partnership with regional cultural organizations. In-person events will extend into the street and be shared online. 

Summoning ghosts of intimacy’s past, the Box will recontextualize and feature selected archival materials from significant local archives of queer history. Please stay tuned for program announcements.

All events at the Box, taking place between August 7 and October 2, will be free and open to the public. The Box will additionally open by appointment. We will share more soon and, in the meantime, please email [email protected] for more information!