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 an estimated 23 billion chickens in the world of which approximately 137 million are killed each day. Despite a common perception that chicken is 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 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