A special preview party will be held Saturday night for American Beef, a photography book about a Harrisonburg-based fight club.
The Staunton Augusta Art Center and Heard The Store have partnered to present the party in celebration of the forthcoming photography book by artists Lorenzo Bacci and Marcel Swann.
Guests will begin the evening at the art center with a Meet the Artists from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Attendees will have the opportunity to preview selections from American Beef and hear directly from the artists about the project.
Guests will then be invited to Heard The Store from 8:30 to 10 p.m., where a copy of the book will be available for viewing.
American Beef is a visual research project that examines how violence is transformed into a regulated spectacle through Streetbeefs, a fight club founded by Chris “Scarface” Wilmore. Designed to confine conflicts to a controlled space and resolve them without firearms, Streetbeefs transforms violence into a codified ritual governed by ethical rules emphasizing mutual respect.
The project investigates how technology amplifies the fights, converting combat into performance. Digital culture, aesthetics and choreography all shape the way spectacles are presented and consumed. Uploading fights online establishes their resolution, while also creating a permanent digital archive that extends impact beyond local boundaries.
Streetbeefs has reduced firearm-related conflicts while exponentially increasing online spectatorship and drawing diverse audiences that include women and children.
American Beef captures the paradox of violence as both deterrent and entertainment, exploring how it becomes a mediated, cathartic experience through new media technologies.
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Marcel Swann is a Florence-based photographer whose early fascination with graffiti and visual culture evolved into a practice rooted in photography as a tool of exploration and documentation. His work frequently addresses the absence of desire in contemporary society. He is also a member of the collective BadSeedZine, founded in 2017.
Lorenzo Bacci is a Milan-based photographer and visual artist. He holds a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Florence and a master’s in Photography and Visual Design from NABA, Milan, and is currently pursuing a master’s in Cultures of Communication at the University of Milan. Since 2019, he has worked as part of the artist duo Bacci | Moriniello and employed a multidisciplinary approach to examine how technology reshapes human perception of reality.
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Rebecca Barnabi
