Material

Chicken waste

By

Made in ,

Animal material 71 Paint 21 Pigment 53 Recycled 151 Chicken 2 Egg yolk 3 Eggshell 16

Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste
Chicken waste

Photos: Giuseppe Abate

The Cock-pit, part of Why did the chicken cross the road

Today chicken is not an animal, but an economical food product.

'Why did the chicken cross the road?' is a project born during the MA Material Futures at Central St Martins University in 2019 and developed over the course of five years. The entire research starts from the KFC Chicken Town 2019 advertisement, in which the Colonel Sanders plays the role of the Godfather, at the top of the fried chicken racket in the city, in Chicken Town (actually Peckham). https://youtu.be/BwUSZdFY_IM?si=6CE3Tc5gVMO58j-q

Walking around the City of London, Abate realises how many times he reads the word chicken, on billboards and signs, often accompanied by stylised and cartoon chicken images. Chicken in London is everywhere: it really is Chicken Town.
In Abate's research, chicken becomes a punctual element to activate reflections on the consumer society, on the problems to which such a cheap product leads and what are the issues that lead to such a poor product.

“Chicken shop ‘drug gangs recruiting children with promise of free food, parliamentary investigation finds’’.
Sky News UK online; 12 August 2019

The Cock-pit consists of a series of real images of brawls in chicken shops, advertising images and real pre-Victorian portraits of cockfighting winners repainted literally with blood and bones of chickens, to trigger a reflection on the consumer society.

Making process

'The Cock-pit' is the part of the project that represents the first material obtained from chicken leftovers. Given the quantity of chicken meat consumed in the City of London, it's very easy to find many bones. After having collected a large quantity of these, Abate carbonises them with fire and then pulverizes them, first with a pestle, then with a blender. What he obtains is a black/gray powder, the 'Black Burned Bones (BBB)' pigment. Through various cooking and drying steps, he obtains another pigment in powder form from chicken blood, a colour similar to the Terra di Siena; this similarity leads to the name 'Sienna rooster blood'. Pulverising eggshells Abate obtained the Eggshell Complexion and the Livorno's White, whose name derives from the type of the hen that lays white eggs, the Livorno hen, in fact.
These pigments, mixed with egg yolk, become an egg tempera, a paint made entirely from chicken scraps called Organic Chicken Tempera, not only to define a truly organic product but above all to mock the word Organic, which in his view is slightly overused today.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.

Ingredients

Chicken bones, chicken blood, eggshells, egg yolk