Monobloc

By Zander McKenzie, Harry Boulton and Callum Harrison








































































































“... In an age where our labour power seems to be all we have and all we are, I want to suggest that the window on Langside Road foretells of a collapse in homely ideologies. Rather than filling a home with an awesome light, a vision of freedom found in the natural world, this window pictures labour as an idyllic act… “


By Toby Upson
Glasgow - Monday 10th March 2025





“... I can’t stand and watch the butcher chop meat, or the shop assistant stack shelves, the mechanic changing oil or the nurse drawing blood. Public life is not a theatre or a display although it becomes the very matter that is recreated and represented across multiple art and cultural outputs. For all these modes and modifications of work, the body has an intrinsic connection to a private inner life of the worker that is kept separate, that is subject as well to the inner workings of a private space vernacularly called “home”. “

By Tara McGinn
Belfast - Wednesday 12th March 2025





“... Listen to the stomach from which it sings and revel there in the sound, the sound of the traffic that is drawing and leaning closer, the sound of that old generator hum. Pull flesh, render any mass skeletal and then back again. Observe these knuckles turning, reducing body to blood and steel to dust. “

By Maeve Thompson
Manchester - Friday 14th March 2025





“...Behind closed doors implies the speculative knowledge that the interior of a home is best left uninterrupted by the outside world, and whatever happens in there, it’s inhabitants withhold an overarching right to not have that sanctum disturbed. This referral to privacy can sometimes act as the protective barrier, the cloak of shame, or fear, of not getting involved with issues that “don’t concern you”...”


By Thomas King
 London - Sunday 16th March 2025










Monobloc presents a site-specific installation by Scottish performance artist Zander McKenzie (b. 2003), in collaboration with Harry Boulton and Callum Harrison. McKenzie’s performance was staged across four major UK cities: Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester and London over the course of a week in March 2025.


In this work, the front door of a home was replaced with a clear cast acrylic structure (Perspex), turning a private threshold into a public frame. For over 32 cumulative hours, McKenzie methodically dismantled and reassembled an MG F K Series 1.8-litre engine from memory. Through this quiet, durational act, Monobloc interrogates and exposes how capitalist frameworks of labour shape space, privacy and our relationship with the built environment.


Each city, bearing a distinct regional identity, finds commonality in a shared erosion of privacy brought on by the tides of industrialisation. It was during this period that daily life increasingly shifted into a cycle of extraction and exhaustion. The factory whistle dictated time; a gradual mechanisation of human labour that chipped away at the individual, establishing the conditions for Monobloc. This sense of erosion extended into the domestic sphere, where the home no longer functioned as a refuge from industrial rhythms but rather as a brief pause in cyclical extraction. Exhausted bodies rested, momentarily recovering before their imminent return to work, a rhythm still endured by many today.


In this post-industrial landscape, privacy operates as a contested terrain: fragile and ambivalent, at once freedom and alienation. The city sharpened this contradiction, intensifying the role of thresholds such as the home, a room or a door in mediating privacy, while simultaneously eroding autonomy through surveillance, labour discipline and urban density. It is precisely this tension between autonomy and encroachment, retreat and exposure, that frames Monobloc. By situating itself in sites synonymous with industrial pasts, the work recalls capitalism’s entanglement with the social construction of privacy, foregrounding how precarious the “right to be left alone” has always been.


The installation’s elements: a Perspex door, durational performance, and the cyclical reconstruction and deconstruction of an engine, collectively stage an inquiry into privacy, exposure and labour across historical and contemporary contexts. The material transparency of Perspex denies concealment, revealing a paradoxical privacy in which the performer is at once shielded and exposed. Stripped of its primary function, the door becomes a barrier that denies entry even as it invites observation. This denial reveals privacy as a luxury often taken for granted, something we assume control over until that control is revoked.


Perspex serves as an emblem of vulnerability: a permeable boundary that both protects and fails. Here, the household is revealed not as a sealed sanctuary but as an extension of capitalist ideals. It becomes a site where surveillance and control are resisted even as they persist. Monobloc, grounded in visibility, challenges viewers to reconsider privacy and to rethink how we inhabit space and encounter others.


This publication functions not as documentation but as a critical extension of the installation itself: a book that curates a unified work across time and place while reflecting the distinct identities of each intervention. Alongside contributions from four writers, each attending in their home city, it includes 64 hours of CCTV footage and 120/35mm photography by Callum Harrison, offering a glimpse into both the physical and conceptual apparatus of the installation.


The evolution of Monobloc was not advertised. In this absence lies a key gesture: a rejection of spectacle in favour of encounter, of mediated visibility in favour of chance discovery. Accessible only to those who stumbled upon it, this unmarked presence evokes the quiet ways capitalism infiltrates domestic space, and the equally quiet ways it might be challenged. The framework is conceived through the memorisation of constructing an engine, where duration and transparency are in constant tension.


Monobloc reveals privacy not as given but as a perpetual negotiation demanding vigilance, attention and, most of all, the courage to remain visible in a world that profits from our retreat.


Thank you to Household Belfast for Monobloc’s inclusion in The Living House Archive.

The Living House is a project by Household Belfast, developed in collaboration with MMAS Architects, that explores the domestic as a site for artistic production
and exchange.

Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre of British Art