PLASTIVORES, 2017

Dominated by the same principles of any other market, the food industry mass-produces edible products that are visually appealing, while nutritionally appalling and even toxic for both our physical and mental health. Plastivores is a project that conjugates different lines of action to reflect on how the visual value of food has taken over the nutritional value of what we eat. The project integrates fieldwork research, art intervention and the creation of a candy that works on the limits of what we consider edible.

The concept Plastivores emerged from the need to define consumers who have a diet based on artificial flavors, poisonous sweeteners and cocktails of preservatives dyed with striking colorants and processed into beautifully packaged edible objects. Candy as the fundamental exponent of this type of diet has served to materialize different perspectives of the project.

On the one hand, the gathered information has been camouflaged in the HARIBO world through an intervention on its traditional Gold-Bears product. The intervention establishes a direct reflexive dialogue with the public by recreating the candy world of Haribo, the best representative of both tradition for candy and the contemporary tendency to transform everything we love into candy. On the other hand and as a counter action to the mass production of industrial edibles, I’ve used a family recipe to make homemade sleeping marshmallow babies one by one. The recipe allowed me to experiment, test and manipulate the visual appearance of the candy by the use of different qualities of sugar and amounts of jelly. Offered to the public in a happening at Fabra i Coats – Factory of Creation, the visual driven choices of the participants revealed the reason why the industry uses artificial ingredients that produce edible toys rather than natural ingredients which result in dull looking items.

Plastivores allows experimentation, interaction and dialogue with the public around the signification of food, how we relate to it in everyday life and the multiple roles it fulfills in contemporary society which lead us to think of food as a powerful tool for mass control.