Chicken waste

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Made in

Animal material 56 Ink 20 Paint 18 Textile 84 Blood 2 Bone 6 Eggshell 14 Skin 2

Chicken waste

Photos: Giuseppe Abate. Chicken Town KFC commercial, Sam Pilling, UK 2019; YouTube; Private Archive; 2019. The Sunday Dinner KFC commercial; Mike Gray Associates; US 1968; Private Archive; 2020

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Reflections on consumer society through the history, life and death of the chicken.

Chicken meat is extraordinarily popular and cheap: there are on estimate 23 billion chickens in the world of which approximately 137 million are killed each day. Despite a common perception that chicken is a healthy meat, the egg and poultry industries are incredibly detrimental to both the environment and our health. Fried chicken remains one of the most popular dishes of all time. Today a chicken is not an animal, but an economical food product. What lies behind and ahead of such a cheap meal?

Giuseppe Abate elaborated a series of materials and artworks produced with chicken’s scraps: bones, blood, eggshells, skin, egg-yolk, egg-white and egg-membrane.

For the realisation of this work they combined the organic chicken tempera colours, eggshell mosaics and chicken feet leather materials. Transforming and re-imaging them into advertisements, images, proverbs, newspaper articles about brawls in chicken-shops and anything else they discovered on the cult of the chicken. Their aim was to reframe the often comical chicken commercials, to match two different realities: the world full of violence and abuses of the chicken meat industry and the world where stressed and non-lucid people are violent to each other in cheap chicken shops.

Information submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank.

Ingredients

Blood, bone, eggshell, skin, tempera