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