Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait by Tyler Kelly

MP Tell me about how your collaborative relationship began.

Jordan Hearns I did my degree in photography and had been taking photos at parties and raves in rural Ireland, and so had Jack around Dublin and Berlin. We were bored during Covid-19 and made a zine together; we made 50 copies and it sold out in two hours. I went to Paris Photo the next year and saw all these students whose attitude and energy I liked, but whose work I didn’t. I thought we should do something similar. Jack came up with the name SMUT.

Jack Scollard When I first moved to London, I was studying bespoke tailoring to become an apprentice on Savile Row. I really enjoyed the rigidity of the craft: at art school we were taught ideas first, technique later, but in tailoring you were given strict parameters in which to work. After a while, I realised I wasn’t sure if I liked the fashion world, and tailoring felt so masculine and stuffy. We’d been working on SMUT while I was finishing the course, and I thought we should invest more time and energy into the project. With tailoring, it’s interesting to see something go from the minutiae of stitches all the way up to a much bigger garment. That idea that every detail matters, no matter how small, is something I still carry now.

MP Tell me about your latest project.

JS We are releasing our next book, the second edition of Cruising Archaeology. It replicates what we did for the first edition, visiting cruising areas across Europe and documenting their material residues.

MP How has the material culture of cruising changed between the last edition and this one?

JS A lot of the objects are similar, but I think what’s more interesting is what’s not found. In cruising areas with younger demographics, there are fewer condoms, perhaps due to medications like PrEP or DoxyPEP. The question of what gets left behind and why is open-ended, and it is what makes the project engaging. For this project, I collected and scanned the objects, the scans became the artworks, and then the artworks were distributed online. For the forthcoming show at Studio Voltaire, I plan to cast the objects in silicone plaster and pour Jesmonite into the cast. It becomes a circular motion: an object becomes an image and then an object again.

MP SMUT projects tend to hone in on this sense of transition and mediation. For instance, the parties you host can last for over 12 hours, and often feature installation works.

JH The length is a musical policy. I hate DJing for an hour; I find it really restrictive. On any of the most transformative nights I’ve ever had, DJs have played for a minimum of two hours, or up to eight or nine. If you give people the space to present themselves, the party will have a different flow. Angel D’lite played the most amazing three-and-a-half-hour set, and the length gave her the space to move between sounds she wouldn’t get to play in other spaces.

MP You’d both been photographing nightlife for years. How do you relate to being a witness through photography?

JS When we made our first zine together, it struck us that we could document not just people but places. Some spaces we talked about a lot, like Jigsaw in Dublin, no longer exist. There’s an emotive element looking back on those photos. For our own parties, witnessing is an important act.

JH I’m very conscious that we need photos of the party; we have to keep the posters and parts of the installation to build an archive. In my practice, I rarely photograph faces. When I was going clubbing when I was younger, I liked the ambiguity of not knowing who the silhouette in front of me was, the tension of sharing things with strangers. It allows you to communicate that anyone can live this experience.

MP Some of the books you publish feature sexual imagery. Have you faced any challenges as an independent publisher getting them printed?

JS We’ve previously had two books refused by a printer. That line between the sexualised and the pornographic is something we test in the work. It boils down to the question: what makes something pornographic? With porn, you engage with the image in a way that’s not usually associated with “beauty”. We recently held a pop-up event for a book we’d printed by Michele Baron, with a poster featuring six images from the book. We were asked to remove two of the images from the poster because they were deemed problematic for school kids in the area. Both images depicted trans women of colour who were clothed, and we didn’t deem either as being particularly suggestive.

MP Heterosexual natalist culture always invents the figure of the child who needs perpetual protection from the outside world.

JS What about the queer child? Who is protecting them?

JH It reaffirms this idea that children don’t think until you tell them to.

JS It also speaks to how anything related to queer cultural production is monitored, because it’s always seen through a particularly sexualised lens. In the case of the poster, I found it affirming because by virtue of it being raised as a problem, it necessitated the work in the first place.

MP How does it feel bringing your work into institutional frameworks?

JS It’s daunting because when I first started Cruising Archaeology, it was an anti-art, anti-institution project. It aimed to be accessible for everyone: it was all via Instagram, so you didn’t have to go to a gallery to see it. Now that it’s being made into an exhibition, I’m having to justify its existence. I did some press around the show, and the comments were crazy. Some were saying it was an endorsement of sexualised drug use, while others were like, “How is this art?” Firstly, I don’t think an image of something is necessarily an endorsement of it, and secondly, I never said it was art! It’s interesting to bring a sexual subculture into an institution while not wanting to diminish the work. When I’m choosing objects to put in the show, do I include the needle that might have had crystal meth in it? Or am I painting a particular view of cruising that might upset people? What SMUT and Cruising Archaeology set out to affirm is that you shouldn’t censor yourself. It’s a constant battle between being happy to be there and being truthful to the reality of your experience. .