On a visit to this week to Z33, an amazing art centre in Belgium, I learned about the Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen and his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (TCCP). It’s wide-ranging investigation of what it would take to create and manipulate scores of chicken breeds from whole over the world into a new species, a universal chicken or Superbastard. The site is full of reflections on genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation and multiculturalness are found throughout his work. Vanmechelen likes to describe his work in Hegelian terms: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Or, the chicken and the egg as a metaphor for the human race and art. Me, I think this photo is fab.
