The Humping Pact shrouds itself in elaborate art-speak, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s about naked men fervently humping their way through desolate environments - from abandoned coal mines to landfill sites. But don’t dismiss it as a Spencer Tunick rip-off or dystopian gay porn, The Humping Pact is a mesmerising meditation on the human body’s relationship to the environment and our desire to conceive of the impossible. It even offers insights into the fallibility of man - the mission statement speaks about “the nature of dissemination, the will to conquer, and illusions of grandeur,” although there’s obviously plenty of irony at play as well.

The founders of The Humping Pact are Berlin-based artists Dmitry Paranyushkin and Diego Agullo who focus their affections on dysfunctional spaces with creative potential. Through their intimate relations with barren landscapes, they hope to release latent tension by channeling it through their bodies, all the while while anticipating an unattainable release.

For the latest installment in The Humping Pact, premiered here on Dazed, Paranyushkin and Agullo went to the Dolomites in northern Italy. “When we arrived to Centrale di Fies it was like love at first sight, we knew immediately that we wanted to do something there. The river, the dam and the empty reservoir that exudes exhaustion all attracted us,” Paranyushkin remembers, adding “it was dangerous, because it was easy to fall over into the dam. I nearly drowned at some point, but nothing really serious,” he shrugs, unfazed, “when we did a film in Brussels, we had to run from security.”