Please join us for an evening with Cine Apartamento at the M&A Storefront installation, Trade Safe Chastity Box. The program opens with a film screening of Behind Every Good Man (1967) and Fun with a Sausage (1984), tracing themes of surveillance, cruising, and gender/sexuality. Running throughout the night, Cine Apartamento will also premiere a looping archival piece that expands and contextualizes the installation, situating the conversation between moving image and interactive architecture. Together, these works invite us to consider how bodies encounter systems of visibility and regulation, and how these same systems can be reimagined as sites of play, intimacy, and resistance.
Trade Safe Chastity Box, designed by Strat Coffman and Adam Barrett Miller, is an interactive architectural device that reimagines architectures of surveillance. Instead of policing the body, it invites it in: to flicker on a screen, to encounter another pulse. CCTV cameras, floodlights, peepholes, and safety mirrors are redeployed as tools 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.
Together, Trade Safe Chastity Box and Cine Apartamento create a dynamic platform for dialogue around queer identity, public space, and contemporary politics. By drawing on archival material and reframing everyday mechanisms of surveillance, the activation opens a space for experimental conversation about sex, the state, and queer bodies. In transforming familiar instruments of control into collective media, the project gestures toward alternative futures of visibility, ones where intimacy, pleasure, and resistance unfold in plain view.
Cine Apartamento, Founded in 2023 by Michael Anthony Hall and Ryan Luis Fuller, is a queer film collective hosting intimate screenings of LGBTQ+ cinema across Los Angeles, while uplifting emerging and fringe artists through multimedia approaches and curated screenings.
What began in their apartment has grown into a community-driven venture that has collaborated with Los Angeles institutions such as Human Resources and Philosophical Research Society, as well as organizations like El Cine, a Latin-centered non-profit providing workshops and screenings, while cultivating conversations with their community.