FOOD CHAIN, 2016-18

Multimedia project > Performance, happening, food art, video, sound and multimedia installations
Variable dimensions
[Young Gallery Weekend III – Escalera de Incendios, 2017]
[Project selected by the creation residency program of Fabra i Coats, 2016]

« Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is the lord of all the animals.»
Animal Farm, George Orwell

Understanding the food chain as a structure of hierarchy and power, the project plunges us into a journey through the human species viewed as each of the links of the food chain where the (eco) system we manipulate and adjust to our needs is actually shaping and enslaving us.

The project consists of six multisensory works that explore the blurred boundaries between man-food-animal. The journey starts with the work Carnivore representing the producer link of the food chain. Thus, the human being is shown as packed meat with its functionality, traceability and available for purchase at their price per hour. The Herbivores installation shows how the human being feeds on money. In perfect symbiosis with advertising, money “gives us what we need” enslaving us to whatever is needed to get it. Pac-Art represents the carnivore link of the food chain. This interactive installation creates a dialogue between the popular video game Pac-Man and the painting Saturn by Goya to show how the struggle for power governs the relations among the beings of our human species. Four Legs Good, Two legs Bad represents the second consumer link of the food chain. This sonorous installation condenses the structure of the Orwellian society and John Cage’s 4’33” to show that animal slaughter is as ruthless and chronic as human slaughter. The Plastivores link shows how the visual value of food has taken over the nutritional value of what we eat. This cyclic journey ends and begins with the decomposers link depicted by the work Substantial Equivalence. This video installation creates a parallelism between the life cycle of a genetically modified tomato crop and the life cycle of the human being gestated in vitro. Both cycles begin in the laboratory and each stage of their lives respond to the laws of a system of artificial selection that creates organisms adjustable to the requirements of the capitalist market.