Unlawful Assembly

Unlawful Assembly is a collection of interrelated short stories by the artists Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.The extended tale by McKenzie is a self-contained account of a murder on the island's volcano. The trio of short stories by Alan Michael are interwoven by a repetition of sinister themes, phrases and characters. Stromboli's identity is irrevocably bound to the 1950 Roberto Rossellini film of the same name, but here Unlawful Assembly uses the island as the backdrop for its own cinematic viewpoint; the watching and making of films is acted out by their protagonists from a variety of obscure angles. It's cast of characters are united by narcissism, ineffectuality and paranoia, and like fast food's ratio of fat, salt and sugar to protein, these stories confront pathology in a similarly consumable (and cynical) package of calibrated sex, violence and humour.