AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, Koen Vanmechelen, La Biennale di Venezia, 2015

KOEN VANMECHELEN AWAKENER/LIFEBANK

KOEN VANMECHELEN AWAKENER/LIFEBANK

JAMES PUTNAM & JILL SILVERMAN VAN COENEGRACHTS GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA (IT) 9 MAY – 22 NOV, 2015

AWAKENER/DRONE, 2015 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, LED lighting) 67,5 Ă— 120 cm

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AWAKENER/LIFEBANK James Putnam and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

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LOCATIONS

16 20

I GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA II LIFEBANK

24 44

MURANO (IT)

III AWAKENER/LIFEBANK FONDAZIONE BERENGO IV AWAKENER/LIFEBANK B RESTAURANT

cover AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, 2015 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, led lighting) 200 × 450 × 10 cm

PALAZZO FRANCHETTI (IT)

HASSELT (BE)

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V AWAKENER/MENACE

STUDIO KOEN VANMECHELEN

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THE AWAKENER / Rod Mengham

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INTERVIEW / Adriano Berengo and James Putnam

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COLOPHON

AWAKENER/LIFEBANK James Putnam and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

Koen Vanmechelen’s new project for the 56th Venice Biennale entitled AWAKENER/LIFEBANK at Palazzo Franchetti, on the Island of Murano and outside his Belgian studio is intended to raise awareness of our ever increasing abuse of food production and includes an innovative biological breeding centre and restaurant. His site-specific installation, LIFEBANK, on the top floor of the Palazzo Franchetti includes two colossal bronze hands, one holding glass seeds and the other a glass chick. They are flanked on either side by stairs to mezzanine galleries with tiers of wooden shelves carrying glass jars containing thousands of ancient and rare varieties of seeds -- fruits, vegetables, grains and herbs. The Palazzo’s third floor is the former site of the Banca di Venezia, where the artist is installing the ‘gene bank’ of heritage seeds from around the world (including those selected by Slow Food and those sourced from AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Africa). In so doing, Vanmechelen maintains we need banks that sustain health rather than merely wealth.

By displaying deposits of these seeds as if they were money and a vehicle for wealth, the work suggests it is the seeds in the end that will have the ultimate value as currency and exchange because without the security of this food-supplybank our society is in jeopardy.

“Seeds themselves, in nature and agriculture, are banks for the future” according to Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement.

This breeding centre is the result of Vanmechelen’s rigorous and groundbreaking research that proposes a potentially beneficial link between three diverse living things – the camel, the chicken and the mushroom. However esoteric it may seem his theory (which comes from a twenty year breeding project of chickens from around the world known as the CCP, the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project) is taken seriously by some of the world’s leading scientists who believe this combination of elements may offer increased fertility and immunity to disease through a diversified gene pool.

Vanmechelen has transported a dromedary camel to Venice especially for the project, together with a rare breed of Javanese chickens. His ongoing research into chicken species has led to the discovery of the Ayam Cemani, that is completely black and does not have the genetic flaws of most domesticated and inbred chickens. Meanwhile, the dromedary is a member of the biological family Camelidae which include camels, llamas and alpacas that possess a unique type of antibodies that are currently being researched by scientists in order to develop pharmaceuticals with potential for treating acute coronary syndrome, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. In order to create the necessary genetic ‘bridge’ to humans Koen Vanmechelen will grow oyster mushrooms on the dromedary’s faeces, which will in turn be fed to the chickens whose eggs will then be cooked together with the mushrooms and served in the Murano restaurant. Also known as ‘Medicinal mushrooms’, oyster mushrooms have been used for thousands of years not just as a culinary ingredient but also in traditional Chinese medicine particularly as a tonic for the immune system.

Besides being high in nutrients they contain ergothioneine, a unique antioxidant exclusively produced by fungi and also statins which are cholesterol lowering drugs.

Behind the scenes, location visit with Slow Food and Fondazione Berengo Palazzo Franchetti, Venice (IT), 2014

‘LIFEBANK’ has been a natural progression from Vanmechelen’s critically acclaimed ongoing ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP)’ series to the newest

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phase of his project -- MECC -- Mushroom, Egg, Chicken and Camelidae as a metaphor for diversity. The CCP where he crossbred eighteen generations of chickens from different countries in the world has been presented at numerous international biennales and art institutions and proclaims the artist’s ongoing statement that crossbreeding and biocultural diversity is essential for the survival of the human race and all life forms. Following purely intuitive and aesthetic interests in the idea of taking chickens from one part of the globe, and crossbreeding with another, he has developed the notion of cosmopolitanism in the broadest sense of the word. In seeing these animals as aesthetic materials he has created almost a mythological narrative which has inspired researchers in biology, genetics, and pharmaceuticals; here his artistic project has left clearcut results that are beyond the reach of the aesthetic. Just as the art works themselves and the life of the artist take on a resonance when done to perfection that engenders the notion of work being a good work, or a successful artwork.

There is a vibration larger than the materiality of the oeuvre something that takes the viewer by surprise, and pulls him/her along by the shorthairs, and this vibration is the inner voice of the artist that emerges from the installation as a kind of soothsayer with a moral imperative woven into his aesthetic concerns.

LIFEBANK GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA Palazzo Franchetti, Venice (IT) Artist’s rendering, 2014

This point of view has been part of the trajectory of Vanmechelen’s first two decades of art making. The ways in which his studio practice (which includes living with and raising ongoing generations of animals as a primary part), incorporates traveling the world with his NGO’s that take the by-products of this artistic research into areas of social programs which help and inform. Up until now, his work has inspired viewers to shift their positions and look at nature and animals in the same way. The artist maintains there should be no difference between species as we inhale and exhale the same air, drink the same water, feel the same losses and pleasures, regardless of our biological status. This is therefore a deep examination of ethical behavior, modernity and globalisation.

There is something generous -- almost Biblical in the way his sculptures, installations, videos, paintings, drawings and lectures have subtly insinuated this melding, with the same innocence and matter-of-factness that we read in the Bible when Noah has been instructed by God to take two of every species great and small, load them onto a boat to withstand the flood. What flood we ask? Was it a Tsunami? Was it Global Warming? Was it Ebola? Was it a problem with genetically modified foods, or a nuclear attack? Was it the result of wars, pestilence, plagues? Or was this some overarching narrative to inspire us to understand there is a relationship between all of these things, and the bird who left the Ark to find an olive branch, when the waters receded - what are we to think then about this interesting view of a dromedary being brought back to Venice with a breeding program of chickens and mushrooms which have the capacity to help immune systems function better?

Vanmechelen’s work inspires us to contemplate many things some simpler than others. It is work that asks us to reflect on immigration, particularly what we like about some people and not others, and similarly consider the way chickens live together and sometimes are afraid of other chickens they don’t know. What we see in the results of his artistic practice is a common sense lesson we would like to forget, that domestication and the insularity of monocultures often lead to death, weakness, illness and extinction. Another Biblical reference not to marry within the immediate family is an example of such common knowledge.

Domestication in some cases has been a good thing, but animals in captivity must have their hunting instincts preserved or they become depressed and die,

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which is why advanced seal habitats make the animals chase their food even in captivity. We are all the same life form, though we like to think we are somehow more advanced as mankind and smarter than plants and animals, we don’t appreciate the cellular intelligence as we should in all life. In ideological terms Vanmechelen’s art draws us back to certain truths about ideas and ideologies, and it is a way of constructing the world that goes beyond mere paint on canvas to implicate our perspective, and what we are willing to understand about ourselves.

In ethical terms, it sees the freedom of diversity as a strength for all life forms, and monoculture as a fascist impulse to exclude and restrict on many levels. The parable is arch but clear. And the internal narrative of this new second level of research with MECC in Vanmechelen’s work is taking both the subject and his medium to another level entirely. The conversation is opening up and bringing the viewer into the belly of the beast by proposing they become part of the extended work and ingest the artistic by-products in their own stomachs. This is one way of taking the audience by the collar and from an artist whose early life was cooking in a gastronomic restaurant the irony is certainly not lost here.

Like many artists he is inspired by nature, he works with it in a proactive way while reminding people of its increasingly fragile state, with this in mind we consider again his use of glass seeds and chick in the palm of the gigantic bronze hands in LIFEBANK. His strikingly original approach to art practice has parallels with that of Joseph Beuys who believed that the artist could assume a mediator, shaman-like role between humans and animals. This is also related to the notion of animism, that non-human entities such as animals and plants possess abundant spiritual essence. His practice holds up a mirror to our changing world with extraordinary psychological depth. Vanmechelen is aware of the key elements that make up the natural world, and the activity that affects the planet’s fragile equilibrium but believes in the all pervading will of nature which functions on the principle of interconnectedness, the mechanistic basis of cause and effect. He retains a profound belief in the visionary function of art and how it can interweave with major scientific research and current global issues. He operates as communicator, reflector and interpreter of key issues of the day and presents thought provoking works that encourage us to both reflect and question with a deeper consideration of our cultural relationship to earth’s stability. The systems of nature are vulnerable but have self-healing components and as Rod Mengham’s subsequent essay suggests this is work that “heralds humanity towards a returning consciousness” -- a new way of thinking which Vamechelen’s work reveals and this is a wake-up call for us all.

Studies for bronze hands with glass chick and seeds, 2014

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HYBRIDITY IN ART AND SCIENCE – C.C.P., 2015 Photography, ink and pencil on paper, nails, stainless steel, polystyrene 200 × 400 × 5 cm

(IT)

LOCATIONS

PALAZZO FRANCHETTI Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti Campo S. Stefano, 2847 Venice (near Accademia bridge)

PALAZZO FRANCHETTI (IT)

I GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA II LIFEBANK

FONDAZIONE BERENGO Exhibition Space on Murano Campiello della Pescheria, Murano, Venice

MURANO (IT) FONDAZIONE BERENGO

III AWAKENER/LIFEBANK FONDAZIONE BERENGO IV AWAKENER/LIFEBANK B RESTAURANT

B RESTAURANT Alla Vecchia Pescheria, Campiello della Pescheria, 4 Murano, Venice

B RESTAURANT

FONDAZIONE BERENGO

STUDIO KOEN VANMECHELEN Hasselt

HASSELT (BE) 41

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COLONNA MURANO

V AWAKENER/MENACE

STUDIO KOEN VANMECHELEN

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FONDAMENTE NOVE 2

FROM PIAZZALE ROMA AND FERROVIA

PALAZZO FRANCHETTI

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ACCADEMIA

(BE)

PALAZZO FRANCHETTI

GOTHIC MODERNISM

Looking at Koen Vanmechelen’s project for GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA at the 56th Venice Art Biennial we are dropped into a world where past and present are suddenly compressed, where plants, animals and human beings dwell together as they did in the medieval bestiaries. The etymology of the term “Gothic” relates to the Goths, the unpolished and rude barbarians, underlying how the features of the “Dark Ages” appeared to be medieval as opposed to classical. Inside this ‘darkness’ something electrifying emerged, that soared above us: the pointed arch, which allowed a new structure to emerge, aspiring towards the heavens.

It rose with an insistence and strength never seen before, as a beacon light of something complex and divine. It was a style that between the 12-16th centuries swept the world in a kind of globalization of its own, it was a universal point of view defined architecturally as a sculpture frames a space, but with internal poetic structures that affected every aspect of civilisation. Like the world we live in today, it was the first time that style and construction method crossed borders and thus the Gothic became both form and content.

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GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA

This year Vanmechelen brings in Venice the same overarching world view also in his triptych of installations AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, consisting of three different artworks; a work in the GLASSTRESS exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti, LIFEBANK, a site-specific, interactive and multi-sensorial installation on the third floor of the same gothic building, dealing with biodiversity as a value of cultural identity in collaboration with Slow Food, and a complex installation in Murano, which combines a dromedary, the black fowl from Java, and mushroom experimental cultivation with both a scientific and gastronomic restaurant experience.

“Gotika” represents a new worldview that was a synthesis of previous ideas. As an architectural style it originated in 12th century France and lasted four centuries, producing an universal vision that appealed to the emotions whether it had sprung up from faith or civic pride. Its development as an antidote to classicism (or, as observed by Vasari in his “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters”… as barbarous German style) set up a new and competing vision of the world, taking the classical hierarchy and pulling it onto something horizontal and holistic, which became the medieval worldview. At the time this was considered wild and brutal, but as centuries elapsed and the style became content, its strengths became obvious, and the pointed arch, which spawned an epidemic of buildings throughout the world, came from the convergence of a mix of influences. It is here that the connection with Vanmechelen’s vision becomes clear. The Gothic style was after all a particular type of cultural cross-fertilization – like it is the artist’s extended international cross breeding program - that mixed the Romanesque style of 10-13th centuries with the early Islamic pointed arch. What better place than Venice, where the mix of influences and cultures produced something completely new and original, to witness this phenomenon? The Gothic permitted a stylistic change that broke with the tradition of massive masonry and solid walls, replacing it with a style where light appears to triumph over substance.

Palazzo Franchetti, Instituto Veneto Di Scienze Lettere e Arti, Venice (IT)

“Gotika” is the synonym for diversity and in the context of this years’ Biennial, within Vanmechelen’s various installations, it works as a call to arms against the mono-culture and monolithic ideologies of any kind. It is at its essence a perspective that is inspired by verticality and light that drives imagination to the regions beyond our physical nature, and beyond our own physical boundaries.

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It presents the universe as a microcosm for a seeming loftiness of ideas that works on a double level, and we see this clearly in the dromedarymushroom-chicken installation AWAKENER/LIFEBANK in Murano, and in the LIFEBANK Project, where the artist, in collaboration with Slow Food, has culled ancient, not-hybridized seeds, from a capillary net of resilient guardians of the real heritage of mankind, and has exhibited them inside a former medieval bank as something even more precious than money, as the real embodiment of life.

The “Gotika” universe, as well as Vanmechelen’s LIFEBANK Project, show us a formal mathematical internal structure that holds the architecture together. Vanmechelen’s worldview sees the scientific purity and genius of nature, whether in the mushrooms’, chickens’ or human beings’ DNA, as the orderly universe with an underlying logic and rationality that must be preserved at all costs. This is the internal structure of the gothic architecture and around it we discover the use of narrative, decoration, sculpture, stained glass and paintings incorporating new narratives, some built on old stories that were incorporated into aspects of the architecture itself. And in AWAKENER/LIFEBANK as in much of Vanmechelen’s world, there are alternative narratives to observe and think about. Unlike the gothic cathedral where visual typological allegories were constructed between Old Testament prophecies and New Testament histories, Vanmechelen turns these epic stories on their head and inverts the heroic with a series of questions addressed to nowadays viewers. Taking the dromedary from the desert and relocating it now here in Venice, he is asking us to think about this story of three wise men: What were they coming to see? What was this new idea of a baby saving the world? Is this a new idea, a new age, a new chapter in our ability to think differently? Constructing a landscape where two continents sit one next to the other, the arid and the fertile, where race, species and eco-systems can mingle as one idea, he gives us the possibility to rethink the gothic, and to build a new structure on the concepts of gothic modernism, based upon a different and ethical universe. At the core of Vanmechelen’s wild and barbaric artistic practice is the invitation to the viewer to speculate on these creative borders and their scientific applications. And for this he was cast within the frame of GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA. jsvc

BLACK MEDUSA, 2015 Black marble, Taxidermy chickens, Taxidermy snakes 76 × 43 × 32 cm

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PALAZZO FRANCHETTI II LIFEBANK

A BANK OF SEEDS GLASSSTRESS created by Adriano Berengo, in 2009 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Art and Architecture Biennal; it represents a fundamental reference point for the relationship between traditional glass-making and international contemporary art. Installed once again in the magical setting of Palazzo Franchetti, the 2015 Edition in partnership with the Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg with Dimitri Ozerkov, the Hermitage Director of Contemporary Art as curator.

Ozerkov has created the title and concept of GOTIKA: “[…] it is evident in many societies that the cornerstone of the system that held the society together before is now lost. And artists are trying to regain it. Quite often art merely reflects what is taking place in a society […] We smile and mock on medieval monks who would spend years by copying a manuscript but most of us live in a medieval kind of Facebook slavery and we never see the forest for the trees.” Ozerkov inserts the topic of biodiversity inviting Slow Food to collaborate in the realization of a multisensorial site-specific installation It is from this combination, perfectly interpreted by the works of Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist able to conjugate art, science and mysticism that his LIFEBANK Project was born. Vanmechelen writes, “Imagine my surprise entering for the first time the big hall at the third floor of Palazzo Franchetti, towered over by the high wooden structure, gothic decor of an ancient Venetian bank. And you have to imagine how the title “LIFEBANK” immediately came to me for an installation like this, where an ancient bank substitutes money with the real heritage of our civilizations: the seed! It has always been fundamental for my projects to construct artistic landscapes where different species and ecosystems find themselves clashing, mixing together to the pursuit of an idea and inviting, in the meantime, the viewer to think about these creative, scientific and ethical borders.”

In this way Cinzia Scaffidi, Vice President of Slow Food Italy and author of the book “Eat as you speak: how the food vocabulary has changed” tells her reaction to the idea: “We were pleasantly amazed when Adriano Berengo contacted us to talk about GOTIKA and about how Dimitri Ozerkov wanted to tell his audience about biodiversity through the stylistic features of contemporary art. Currently we are extremely busy with EXPO, where these themes are our daily agenda but, I have to say, making an artistic matter of all of this, a substance to mould with glass… has awakened our interest, opening new possibilities of communication. For the LIFEBANK Project we immediately thought of the ancient, lost, forgotten seeds… to the seeds that, selected, collected and preserved by resilient farmers and specialized centres of research, truly represent the genetic heritage of our culture and millenary civilization even more today, as Ozerkov says, that the cornerstone of our society is lost and has to be regained with bravery and tenacity in the Mother Earth, as we from Slow Food use to say”.

The University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), Pollenzo (IT) founded by Carlo Petrini

Those “resilient farmers”, as Cinzia Scaffidi says, who because of their life and rural economy models may be called “secular farmer-monks”, find perfect correspondence with the concept of “GLASSTRESS GOTIKA LIFEBANK Project” and the character of Piergiorgio De Filippi, owner of the Bio-Social Farm “Il Rosmarino”. De Filippi was involved by Slow Food in the collaboration with Koen

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“After Slow Food’s invitation, I have strongly adhered to the LIFEBANK Project, seeing in the intuitions of its curator Dimitri Ozerkov an artistic image that is complementary to my own research. Biodiversity is a value that not necessarily clashes with globalization and so the far and the near may become a fertile soil where the multi-sensoriality, inserted in the experience of artistic fruition of the artwork of the Master Koen Vanmechelen, becomes a theatre for a fruitful dialogue with the audience. It will be fascinating to create a whole new menu, completely inspired by the ancient and forgotten seeds, by the LIFEBANK…” LIFEBANK PROJECT, will be possible to admire at the third floor of Palazzo Franchetti in Venice from 8.05.2015 until 22.11.2015 within the exhibition GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA, appears thereby, for its very nature of co-working, a path that well combines with the very nature of Murano glass-making art, that lives indeed on the fruitful relationship between the artist and the Kiln Master.

Piergiorgio De Filippi, owner of the Bio-Social Farm “Il Rosmarino”

As Adriano Berengo, Patron of the ambitious project that, after Venice, will follow a road map toward prestigious museums all over the world, says: “the heart and the soul of Murano glass is given by a clash, a duel between two medieval knights, the artist and the glass-making Master. But, at the end, no one will win because from their struggle a new magnificent core will rise, fruit of the energy and of the mystic union between them. The work of art will be born”.

Vanmechelen in the constitution of the big ancient seed catalogue and in the interactive multi-sensorial garden, that is the central part of the artistic installation and the perfect embodiment of this original collaboration.

“The fundamental principle that has oriented our choice has been consistent with the typical diet of our territory. Even setting out from a cereal which is the symbol of the evolution of our civilization, the Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum), whose history dates back to the Neolithic, and marked the transition for the Human Species from the nomadic and predatory economy towards the rural and settled one, the selection will follow the development of the typically Mediterranean diet, being careful to insert varieties without any artificial hybridation, but simply representing the course of natural evolution.

For this reason, with respect of the spirit of Slow Food “Terra Madre”, the obtaining of the selected 500 varieties of seeds constituting our Life Bank will take place exclusively through the direct contact with farmers and associations of safeguard spread all over the national territory.”

Slow Food logo, Santorini (GR)

The artist Koen Vanmechelen, who also boasts of a past of first class chef, strongly believed that the concept of multi-sensoriality of his installation should also be expressed with a special tasting of this rare lost seeds.

Therefore, always in collaboration with Slow Food, the starred chef Pietro Leemann, Chef Patron of the Restaurant Joia in Milan and Ambassador for EXPO Milan 2015, has been involved in the project. First in Italy to bring the vegetarian and natural cuisine to international excellency, Pietro Leemann is famous for his total commitment to the cultural and anthropological values connected with the food, so that, after having taught at the prestigious Tsuiji Cooking School in Osaka, he has bravely pushed himself toward a kind of cuisine that may be called spiritual, or, indeed, GOTIKA.

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MURANO

DOUBLED LANDSCAPE

III AWAKENER/LIFEBANK FONDAZIONE BERENGO

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.

Koen Vanmechelen meticulously planned and staged every detail of this magical and otherworldly image down to the choice of landscape and specific time of day. In order to present this work on such an epic scale meant the resolution of the light box image needed to be very high quality and this couldn’t be achieved using simulation or trick photography. He therefore decided he must make a special expedition to the Arabian Desert to do the shoot while the foreground scene was taken locally at a field in Limburg and involved his team of helpers arranging thousands of mushrooms. The division or ‘horizon’ between these two very diverse landscapes is perhaps symbolic of the borderline between a fertile living world and the barren land of the dead. The image has a dramatic, cinematic quality and is able to capture the fleeting moment in time of its enigmatic narrative. An imaginary location, something akin to the contemporary view of the Garden of Eden in Cranach’s Adam and Eve mixed with the surrealism of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. The pictorial landscape is equally stylized when blown up on a light box where the figures and animals appear almost in life size. It is an image we have never seen before, but as we live today in a globalized world created by images, none of which are real -- AWAKENER/LIFEBANK smells like something we know.

Everyone’s daily life consists now of a combination of short moments of reality inter-connected by images that arrive moving or static, with texts or abbreviated language on screens of various sizes -- from tiny ones on old mobile phones, to larger ones on Blackberry’s to even larger ones on smart phones, iPads, computers, large screens at home, and bigger ones in screening rooms; we can understand for example how it might be possible to look at this artwork as if it were an advertisement for a singular holiday experience in a newly developed arid land. Such an idea takes us away from the responsibility and ethical stance we would normally have as viewers. Instead we retreat too often into such delicious images for succor, for information, to raise our emotional levels or to buffer them.

We are used to looking at now two generations of artists who use the internet as raw material for art; these flat digital pictures are ghosts of something that creates still another ghost. This second generation art object gives off a residue of technology that has nothing of what Benjamin recounted in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Manual Reproduction where the work of art comes from an object that once held cult value which evolves as an instrument of magic, and later it becomes a work of art with its aura, and this ultimate retrenchment (his words) of the human countenance.

View of Murano, Venice (IT)

In AWAKENER/LIFEBANK we are presented with a clearly artificial landscape, created to be read as a fictional place, a dream, a nightmare, a mythological story, a modernist vision of worlds on the edge of something that is a seam or a plateau -- it is on these furthest edges that transformation occurs, when opposites or polarities wrestle desperately to produce new understandings. Vanmechelen has used the trope of self-portraiture as he has often in the past, a wanderer, a mystic, a shaman, a solitary artist pulling his hair out to find a way of telling this particular story, which is wider than his own understanding. This is the richness

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AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, 2015 Photograph, lambda print, framed 100 Ă— 225 cm

of AWAKENER/LIFEBANK it is bigger than this artist who has the natural world as his medium and the art world as his audience. He takes us into the work across a broad foreground that comes right to where we are standing on a lawn peppered with mushrooms. Something clearly from a fairy tale -- are we to eat them and be transformed into a nomad in a feather coat too? Will each one of us be given a beast of burden to accompany us on our way? Even for a moment consider this, just as you don’t need to know the man in the dessert is the artist, you don’t need to know that the female figure is actually a real person, Chido Govera, who has created an NGO that is supported by the artist as an extension of his studio practice where mushrooms are cultivated to provide economic development for orphans in parts of Africa where the girls have been abused and left without resources. If you have been following his works during the last years, this is knowledge you carry along like a footnote. Otherwise the identity of the figures becomes something that is part of the narrative you will learn as we go along. It reminds me of the great history paintings made by Ilya Kabakov after he had been to Japan in 2007 for the Imperial Prize. This marked the first time in his life he has included himself, his wife Emilia, his fellow winner the painter Richard Hamilton as well as the Emperor and Empress of Japan in very large-scale paintings where they functioned like Baroque masterworks regardless of knowing the names of the figures that float in and out. We don’t look at AWAKENER/LIFEBANK with concentration because it is Koen himself and Chido in the foreground. There is much greater information coming to us very quickly from the inner life of the work itself and this is far beyond the personality of its maker.

Context is always present inside the fabric of an image and here it is abundantly clear standing in front of this portrait of two people and two dromedaries that the scene reminds us of cinemascope, we imagine that something has just happened, and something is going to happen, and it is a moment in time, like a single frame from a film we have seen before. The location has references for all of us, Lawrence of Arabia, Alice in Wonderland, but it is surreal in its stillness.

Although you can imagine the quiet botanical flurry of plant life on the lawn with its mushrooms that have sprouted after rain followed by intense sun; you can smell the fertile moistness of the grass, and the slightly smoky fur of the dromedary that looks off towards another horizon, protecting the crouched form of a beautiful African woman wearing a white feather mantle. Across the edge of time and space the scene falls into the middle distance which is the line between these two locations, and beyond is the hot dryness of the desert where another figure stands almost at the top of the hill looking towards another horizon. We have two figures, and two animals all of whom see their own horizon lines, and so where are we standing in this world of crossed perspectives. The man holds the dromedary with a loose grip, the animal is calm, the man has his weight towards the beast, but his bent arm seems to be tentative, unsure, as if he is pausing and looking for some reason to continue. Is this the message of AWAKENER/LIFEBANK that in this moment of lassitude, there is something that must arouse us again to move, to take action, to accelerate?

AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, Mushroom Center Fondazione Berengo, Murano (IT) Artist’s rendering, 2014

artist himself, or the woman in the foreground, the work stirs us on a formal level that we cannot clearly express. It makes us think of many other epic stories, our many diverse cultures are full of them, of heroes wandering arid landscapes, or heroines seeking refuge or waiting for enlightenment. Are they looking towards or away from each other, have they missed something or in the process of finding something that causes them to be in these two parallel worlds? We have very little to go on save the poetry of the construction with its combination of exoticism and archaic language in this open-ended and suggestive narrative. The journey is one we must all take and Vanmechelen asks us to contemplate the need to look beyond the surface and see where the somnolent forces lie in wait for mankind.

These two figures pause, out of time, seem to listen for something coming from a faraway place; they are relaxed with a sense of anticipation and expectation waiting for the sounds or the signs that will answer their questions as well as our own. jsvc

A question Vanmechelen asks frequently in many different ways with sculptures and paintings that appear far more conventional at first reading, but turn on a dime into minimalist volumes made of glass and steel, or rich thick oil paintings made from feathers and pigment, or nests of glass eggs that float on water. This large light box is a work that speaks with its grandeur of space impossible to find except perhaps at the edge of an oasis. The work is inhabited by both stillness and an implied sense of elongated time. Whether you know anything about the

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Behind the scenes, photo shoot AWAKENER/LIFEBANK Desert of Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Meeuwen (BE)

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MUSHROOM BREEDING CENTER - MECC, 2015 Freezer, drying closet, scale, spiral mixer, stainless steel, plastic box 213 × 316 × 109 cm

MUSHROOM BREEDING – MECC, 2015 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, LED lighting) 90 × 135 cm

A DROMEDARY IN VENICE The dromedary is both biologically and conceptually central to Koen Vanmechelen’s AWAKENER/LIFEBANK. The artist is proposing an intriguing link between camelids, chickens and mushrooms to provide a food that could prove beneficial to the human immune system. It is part of Koen Vanmechelen’s latest research into fertility and immunity following years of crossbreeding chickens as a metaphor for diversity. A pilot project was staged at Het Domein, a museum in the Netherlands from January until June 2015, where he presented a dromedary and chickens together with a mushroom producing laboratory. The dromedary’s enclosure occupies the greater part of the exhibition gallery and extends to an outside area. And yet the pen that separates the museum visitor is ambiguous as he nudges a fence post with his nose to try and smell them. Coming as close as possible, the large eye stares at the visitor, lashes long and beautiful, the velvet skin above the mouth begging to be stroked, and yet it can’t be, we are just meant to look and though we would like to be inside and rub the animal behind its ears, we look at it looking at us. And yet we have to remind ourselves that this is a museum not a zoo. The dromedary is in residence like an artist, and part of the day it is inside and part of the day it is outside in a yard also built expressly for it, twice as large as the interior gallery.

AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, Dromedary and Chicken Breeding Center Fondazione Berengo, Murano (IT) Artist’s rendering, 2014

In his Venice installation AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, the dromedary is accompanied by black un-hybridized Javanese chickens kept in a garden on the island of Murano. Mushrooms are grown on the dung of both animals, and it is hoped that the mushrooms will absorb some of the enhanced sub-atomic qualities that Vanmechelen’s eighteen generations of cross breeding have proposed to scientists and biologists around the world. His longstanding artistic intuitions have proven over two decades to present potentially useful applications from his artworks into utilitarian scientific and industrial applications. From this Cosmopolitan Chicken Project we know an increased immunity and fertility are the results of genetic diversity. Part of these early findings stands to help the world with its problems of monoculture and industrial farming.

With AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, the aesthetic argument is pushed even further again, and we are to leave everything we have come to expect from his work and look at the larger context. We are asked to leave the iconic image we have of this artist screaming at the chicken while the chicken screams back at him. We move on from the artful observations about race, species, genetic modification, cross breeding, eugenics, monoculture and domestication, and his work for Venice asks us to look even farther afield. And like the biblical stories of the wise men coming on the backs of camels across continents and deserts to follow a star, supposedly high in the night sky like a beacon, towards a destination they have only a marginal understanding of. And like all foundation stories, the tale of the Three Wise Men, bearing gifts of Gold, frankincense and myrrh to present to the new baby who allegedly was born to a virgin as the Son of God. Whether or not one believes this in any shape or form, what interests Vanmechelen is the way in which the animals were central to the journey, and they transported this idea of civilisation from all corners of the world to a new place, and maybe the baby was just a metaphor for some kind of new idea. Religion has taken the narrative and done what it always does, create infallibility.

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AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, Dromedary and Chicken Breeding Center Fondazione Berengo, Murano (IT) Artist’s rendering, 2014

Art dwells in the land of the fallible, and it is here that this new chapter of Vanmechelen’s ideas sits in Venice. We are looking at a supposition, we are looking at his questions and none of us have the answers, but in this AWAKENER/ LIFEBANK functions as an alarm clock, or an ecological, scientific or even a spiritual alarm. The function of art after all is to have us look at the dromedary which we know as a common animal whose earliest origins have been found on the southern coast of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia with carbon dating at 8200 BP and calibrated 7100-7200BC -- and yet this artist working today perceives a metaphorical significance in such an animal and that is why he is putting it firmly in the middle of his world view. We are invited to look at this animal in the garden behind the Murano glass factory surrounded by black chickens from Java, and become captivated by this odd mixture of species, and it’s intriguing link with contemporary art.

Today there are almost 13 million domesticated dromedaries in the world, and for the moment there are also one in a museum in Holland and one soon in Murano.

Like the chicken, they have been taken from one continent to the next by man for thousands of years and used as beasts of burden, means of transportation and haulage. We know they are herbivore and eat foliage and desert vegetation, they show no signs of territoriality, and they use a wide variety of vocalizations to communicate with each other. If one of the themes of the GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA is to be looked at here, we know that during the Gothic period 12-16thc there was an enormous mixture of cultures especially in Venice. Beginning in the 9th century Venetian merchants became regular trading partners with their counterparts in the Near East.

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SORTING TABLE - MECC, 2015 Photograph, lambda print, framed 130 × 100 cm

THIS IS NOT A CHICKEN, Het Domein, Sittard (NL), 2015, Installation View ENERGY = MASS – CC®P, 2015 Diptych, DNA sequencing printed on plexi glass, wall mounted on aluminium frame, neon lightning 200 × 410 × 15 cm (overall size)

Although a dromedary in Venice may seem a bizarre image there is an intriguing precedent in the 14th century bas-relief of a merchant with his camel on the façade of Palazzo Mastelli also called Palazzo del Camello (House of the Camel) in Cannaregio. While on the other side of the canal, the church Madanno dell’Orto; originally home to -- local legend has it --’the Mori brothers’ Rioba, Santi and Alfani who came from Morea in the Peloponese around 1112.’ The question we ask is how did these silk merchants involved in trade with the Levant wearing Ottoman style turbans and robes get this dromedary to Venice. And we must imagine it was the same way that Vanmechelen has, on a boat. And this as a “mis en scene” is not so different, if we look at this bas-relief, with the camel and the man in his native costume looking up at the animal, from the mythic panorama the artist gives us with himself wearing a feather coat, camel in hand in a desert, while Chido Govera crouches on a lawn sprouting with mushrooms.

So we understand that it was this early mixture and diversity of cultures allowed trade to flourish, seeing something new and different from somewhere else, being the first in your neighbourhood to come home with a fragrance or a spice or a fabric. The world was global and local even then, and art reflected this then, as it does now. But this is not enough to make the dromedary into an artwork, or to have him inhabit an installation that becomes something larger and more resonant, of a discussion between the nature of experimental transformative social process, as Beuys liked to describe when lecturing and performing, and the aesthetic. We are looking at this impetus to scratch the imagination, and like the chicken, the dromedary is the paint brush, and the total artwork is something that will make the viewer see differently, feel uncertain enough to open his imagination to the relationship between the human being, nature and the cosmos, and the interconnections between art and the notion of the aesthetic, as a wider expanded practice that can stimulate understanding towards a more sustainable future. jsvc

Organic medium for mushroom production

Dromedaries at play, Morel (left) and Truffle (right)

Chido Govera in mushroom laboratory Behind the scenes, Mushroom, Dromedary and Chicken Breeding Center, Meeuwen (BE), 2015

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MURANO IV AWAKENER/LIFEBANK B RESTAURANT

MUSHROOMS Koen Vanmechelen’s B Restaurant project in Murano involves the creation of his mushroom growing centre as part of his research project linking the mushroom with the camel and the chicken. The use of food both as a sculptural material or a performance medium has been part of art practice since the 20th century and pioneered by the Futurist and Fluxus movements.

More recently a number of contemporary artists have created performances and events where the production and presentation of food becomes participatory and interactive. In Rirkrit Tiravanija’s projects the audience become integral with the work as they are invited to sit in a lounge area he has created to eat a Thai meal that he cooks and serves while they are engaged in discussion. Another example is Lucy + Jorge Orta’s ongoing series ‘The Meal’ where they organize large-scale community meals that focus on issues of local and sustainable food, health and community.

The mushroom growing laboratory involves the artist’s collaboration with Chido Govera, a kindred spirit from Zimbabwe, who is a specialist in mushroom cultivation. She started mushroom farming at the age of 11 and went on to get specialist training on how to farm, preserve and sell mushrooms. She has become dedicated to teaching underprivileged African communities how to grow mushrooms to provide a basic source of nourishment to combat starvation. She received a scholarship from the ZERI Foundation and with their backing she designed and implemented training programs to start up mushroom farming communities in Zimbabwe, Congo, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania and South Africa, as well as schools and communities in the US and Europe.

Mushrooms are a fundamental source of human nutrition since earliest times in the Prehistoric and Bronze Age communities in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. They are depicted in the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead which date from at least 1500BC. Referred to as ankh-khut, the plant of life, the mushroom was symbolic of immortality and designated a royal food, exclusive to the Pharaoh. According to folklore and cultural traditions in Russia, China, Greece, Mexico and Latin America, mushrooms were believed to offer humans great vitality and strength. The ancient Greeks and Romans grew mushrooms on slices of a poplar trunk while the Chinese and Japanese have a long tradition of growing shiitake on rotting logs. The French were foremost in the formal cultivation of mushrooms particularly during the reign of Louis XIV when they were grown in special caves near Paris. In the late 19th century, mushroom production spread from Europe to the United States where home gardeners experimented with growing this new and previously unknown crop.

Pietro Leemann, Chef Patron of the Restaurant Joia, Milan (IT)

Mushrooms are not plants, and instead of seeds, they reproduce asexually through spores and require different conditions for optimal growth. Chido Govera’s simplified sustainable mushroom farming method provides food security through converting organic waste into food. Since they are a very easy crop to grow and require little labour, investment and space they are ideal for cultivation in poor and underprivileged communities. For the B Restaurant she has grown Oyster mushrooms on the dromedary faeces and these so-called ‘Medicinal mushrooms’, have been used for thousands of years not just as a culinary ingredient but also in traditional Chinese medicine particularly as a tonic for the immune system. Besides being high in nutrients they contain ergothioneine, a unique antioxidant exclusively produced by fungi and also statins, which are

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SIX MUSHROOMS ON A SHELVE – MECC, 2015 Organic medium, plastic, 3D printed mushrooms (Polyamide (Selective Laser Sintering)), plastic resin, wood 225 × 224 × 49 cm

Chido Govera, founder of The Future of Hope, working with local communities in Zimbabwe on mushroom cultivation

AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, Mushroom Breeding Center B Restaurant, Murano (IT) Artist’s rendering, 2014

cholesterol-lowering drugs. Vanmechelen’s Restaurant B fits with his wider vision of public engagement projects that include educational events, talks, conferences and philanthropic NGO activities in underdeveloped countries like the ‘Cosmogolem’ and ‘The Walking Egg’ that involves issuing fertility kits for African women. jp

Chicken breeding center, artist’s studio, Meeuwen (BE)

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AYAM CEMANI, 2015 Lambda print on plexi glass 80 x 80 x 3 cm

HASSELT

IV AWAKENER/MENACE

STUDIO KOEN VANMECHELEN

MENACE The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations […]. All purposeful manifestations of life […] in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance […].This representation of hidden significance through an embryonic attempt at making it visible is of so singular a nature that it is rarely met with in the sphere of nonlinguistic life.

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, ILLUMINATIONS, Pimlico 1999 p.72-3 This three-minute video AWAKENER/MENACE is a study in disturbance, discomfort and melancholy. It takes us from our safe position in front of the work of art and places us on the other side right in the middle of the action with the artist trying to make sense of this moment in time. There is something ominous coming, you see it in the first few seconds in the black sky with the long shot above the studio in the background there is a sound of something buzzing, it might be an industrial hum or the sound of bees in the hive. Suddenly we understand it is a drone, and we see its awkward skinny arms bobbing to menace us. Why a drone, is it for the long shot of the yard in front of his studio with its newly constructed conservatory and vegetable garden, the bee hives and nest of glass eggs, the photo print affixed on the wall from Darwin’s Dream showing the artist blowing smoke into a huge glass egg, reminding us of the Sistine ceiling maybe with God putting life into mankind through the touch of Adam’s hand. The eye of a chicken is blinking through the rain and darkness, a hundred times larger than normal making us look into something like the retina of a giant.

A mournful saxophone is accompanied by a bass cello, instrumentalists stand outside on a scaffold as if accompanying a public hanging they play in this film set as if it is a party, we see the rails lying across the yard and a big camera for tracking shots, suddenly we see the upper body of a workman in profile holding a bag that may be loaded with grain, his red beard visible in the harsh lights of this wet night, the hairs of his beard may remind us of the dromedary, but then we see his arm a second later sowing seeds in an ancient gesture. Then suddenly the artist is standing next to the dromedary. But it is the animal who looks at us directly in the eye, the artist glances up at the drone, we see bees, honey in the hive, a short moment of a dromedary munching a bit of straw. The work continues with images one after the other like quotations taken from a longer work, time jumps, night, then day, and then night again. Pouring rain drenches members of the film crew caught trying to heave enormous light and wind machines across the wet driveway.

Artist’s Studio, Hasselt (BE)

The sounds of music and machinery, rain, thunder, then more rain is undercut by the omnipresent sound of this drone. And you can’t help but think about this in villages and remote landscapes where they know the sound far better than we do.

Wake up, the work insists. We are all in this and watching this work, as if it were only art will be detrimental to us all. Systems are changing. Weather patterns now bring seasons with ferocious intensity, genetic engineering is advanced beyond our wildest imagination, while at the same time certain things have seemingly stayed the same. Instead of giving us the reassurance that this is all just an illusion, like making a movie, don’t worry, nothing bad will happen even if it seems so, even if everyone is worried, even if the animals are scared. This is an artwork that invokes subterranean fear and desire. We want to see it again, to be sure what is real and what is imaginary. And here is this edge in Vanmechelen’s vision,

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because in his imagination art and life are mixed up. There is no safe aesthetic distance anymore, and this is why it is both a stage set, the front lot of his studio, a garden he will use for fruits and vegetables, and a surreal landscape on a stormy frightening night. He takes you behind the picture plane into the studio to make it even more clear what the work is about.

And in this train of thought you might wonder why I suddenly wanted to reread Walter Benjamin while thinking about this. I would say that it was the only place I could find any balance. Because the world we see in the art of Vanmechelen appears on the one hand like Paradise Regained, or maybe it is a contemporary version of Breughel but this is quite tenuous at best and the evil that lurks in the dark corners seems more akin to the horrors of Bosch-- here again the issue of seeing clearly and recognizing the inherent dangers surrounding us becomes part of his aesthetic strategy, pay attention, he seems to want to shake you, don’t you get it yet? He is impatient.

His vision of how to reach us with his fears and intuitions appears more than a century after Goethe explored the invisible in Elected Affinities, and we know how important this was to everyone from Walter Benjamin to Rudolf Steiner though to Joseph Beuys. And it is Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations, reveals this notion of the dynamic being inside things, of some kind of holism that seeing and hearing is possible beyond the retinal and the aural. Some may say this is all too esoteric -- to be on this plane where the mystical seeks to become concrete, actual and intimately involved in our everyday lives. But here it is again, and not a moment too soon.

AWAKENER/MENACE is a video work that asks the viewer to open up these doors of perception to understand the greater suffering of Nature (of which we are only one part) and to begin to work in the world, to do something. In this arena we become part of the discussion of an aesthetic worldview that is at its core ethical; a poetic structure that has an impact on both viewers and participants in this experimental transformative social process. This video is created by a team of people and everyone is important. The artwork reveals this collective as part of its formal structure. Aesthetics equals ethics the work reminds us. The aesthetic we believe creates an enlivened human being with responsibility not as a moral imperative, but in his/her ability to respond. This view of the aesthetic is not cosmetic, decorative or superficial. The artist who understands this takes us into a realm that helps us overcome our numbness and makes us engage.

This strategy mobilizes people’s imaginations by disrupting normal reactions, by forcing us to feel something before we understand it intellectually.

Here we are with a choice to do something about it, or to find ourselves forever inside this three minute loop of darkness, thunder, rain and the humming of a drone overhead, which drowns out everything from the sound of honey bees, to the silent gesture of a farmer sowing his crops, the sad quizzical look of a dromedary staring at you as if to say, what are you going to do about this. And then trying to pull out of its harness as thunder claps violently. The Garden of Eden gone mad, or is it the beginning of purgatory before we see the doors open for the Last Judgment. It is all present and accounted for here again a modernist vision laced with Biblical proportion. jsvc

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AWAKENER/COMING WORLD, 2015 Glass eggs, branches, stainless steel, LED lightning 50 × 270 × 270 cm

AWAKENER/TURBULENCE, 2015 Photograph, lambda print, framed 150 Ă— 225 cm

AWAKENER/RAINY NIGHT, 2015 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, LED lighting) 90 Ă— 135 cm

Behind the scenes, artist’s studio, Hasselt (BE), 2015

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THE AWAKENER Rod Mengham

The ancient Greek word for the chicken means ‘the awakener’, the announcer of day, the herald to humanity of returning consciousness. Koen Vanmechelen has organized his work around the renewal of this meaning, around the need to revive awareness in the human species as it sleepwalks into a future of globalized industry and culture. It was in fact the intensive farming of broiler chicks and battery hens that led to the monopolizing of the poultry business and the expansion of fast food chains—market leaders in the development of a global consumer culture. The purpose of Vanmechelen’s art is an experimental reversal of the recent history of the chicken, in a conceptual demonstration that offers humanity itself a different way forward in future. While the poultry industry has concentrated on breeding programmes that denature the animals at its disposal, delivering a crippling obesity in meat chicks and mechanical rates of egg production in laying hens (geneticists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have recently bred a completely featherless chicken) Vanmechelen’s ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken Project’ is geared entirely to continuous crossbreeding.

The practical aim of this long-term project that requires every-varying combinations of breeds through successive generations is the assisted evolution of cosmopolitan genetic material. The welfare benefits of such a programme include the rearing of chickens with naturally enhanced immunity, fertility and adaptability. The results have been of genuine interest to scientists, whose involvement has been prominent in the symposia and publications constituting a significant part of the output generated by the project. It is important to understand the extent and range of this discursive activity subtended to a practice that is simultaneously scientific and artistic in its readability and ethical in its motivation. The ethical aim of the project is to confront the homogenising culture of global modernity with the necessity for difference. With the values of diversity increasingly threatened by technological, political and economic incorporation, social behaviours and cultural practices originated by specific communities are threatened with extinction. Vanmechelen’s interventions in the art world ensure that the ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken Project’ becomes a tool for reflection on the values of diversity in the human sphere. The artistic aim of the project is to confront humanity’s own representations of the chicken since these are of course representations of humanity’s stance towards the natural world and of its own place within it. The focus on the chicken, of all species that might have been chosen, is logical given the longevity of humanity’s relationship with this, the first avian species to have been domesticated (c.5500 BC). And the history of art is a history of changing perceptions towards animals where the kind and degree of change has been more dramatic and shocking in respect of the chicken than of any other animal, whether mammal, reptile or avian. The chicken is now the most domesticated and consequently the most denatured of animals; the greater use we can make of it, the more deliberately we abuse it.

Vanmechelen regards the pejorative nature of our current attitude towards the chicken as a more effective cage than the metal bars confining battery hens.

He combines the political activism of organising meetings and discussions with the performance of humane farming methods and the very literal iconoclasm of an assault on the prevailing image of the chicken as an animal we refuse to take seriously. The imagery at the centre of his own exhibits and installations is remarkable. If the twentieth century and twenty first century chicken is readily identified with a lack of intelligence, a comic bearing and gait, and a propensity to hysteria, the pre-twentieth century chicken was more commonly linked to the virtues of foresight, vigilance, courage and loyalty. Both hens and cockerels were

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head and shoulders. The cockerel’s bust and plinth were fashioned from the same ennobling material, marble, as that of the human worthies. The inscription, ‘The Cosmopolitan Mechelse’, used the same design, font and font size, to assert equal status for its representative of the animal kingdom. Vanmechelen’s icon of cross-breeding was itself a means of crossing human and animal pedigrees, not in order to parody the Venetian lineage of achievements but in order to elevate its own claim to respect and emulation.

THE APPEAL OF THE CHICKEN - C.C.P. 2003

given influential roles to play in ancient mythologies and were feared or cherished figures of folklore in most parts of the world. Vanmechelen recovers that sense of auratic power through the manipulation of scale, point of view, medium and genre, erasing the derogatory associations of more recent popular stereotypes.

During the Venice Biennale of 2011, Vanmechelen installed a mixed media demonstration of the ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken Project’ in the Palazzo Loredan, 15th century seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. The interdisciplinary nature of the institution was perfectly suited to the versatility of the installation, with its interactive workshops, live incubation procedure and streamed broadcasts, but its contemporaneity was hinged with the antecedent cultural history of Venice through an audacious intervention in its collection of portrait busts. Placed among the likenesses of distinguished figures from the Venetian past was the head and crest of a rooster, scaled up to the proportions of a human

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The genre of portrait painting has a central place in Vanmechelen’s recuperation of the relations of humans and animals as focus for the comprehensive revaluing of bio-cultural diversity. Every chicken engendered by the cross-breeding project is given identity documents that replace their utilitarian equivalents in the world of human bureaucracy with artefacts of high cultural value. In terms of pedigree, the passport photo is poor cousin to the profiles, frontal and three-quarter views of each chicken that are magnified, enlarged to a grand scale and almost invariably mounted within gilded baroque frames. The formality of repeating the same poses only serves to underline the details of individuation in each depiction, the natural luxuriousness of the plumage and the infinite variation in colouring.

These are photographic portraits that belong generically alongside paintings commissioned to pay homage to persons of distinction or fame, often surpassing them in splendour. But Vanmechelen also portrays the chicken as a being of mythical stature and implicit power in paintings that employ pigment, feathers and other body parts in stylized representations seeming to portend obscure moments of crisis in a cycle of destruction and creation. Without referencing any belief system in particular, these works evoke the gestures and materials of certain kinds of painting connected with devotional practice in the traditional cultures of native peoples. They have a dynamism and decisiveness of execution giving them a freshness and spontaneity but also a deep resonance with attitudes of reverence towards the natural world. They are expressive both of the artist’s immersion in the moment of composition and of buried cultural memories of the totemic meaning of animals. The shamanistic obsessiveness with which these works return again and again to the image of the chicken without exhausting its meanings—without ceasing to add to its meanings—is if anything redoubled in Vanmechelen’s pictorial and sculptural meditations on the symbolism of the egg.

The egg is one of the most familiar objects in everyday life. We all know what to expect upon cracking open its thin shell, and yet what it holds is one of the central mysteries of creation: the chicken and egg conundrum of which came first.

Viewed scientifically, the answer is almost certainly the chicken, since eggs are produced by proteins found within the hen’s ovaries; but viewed philosophically, the question itself has value by focusing reflection on the common ancestry of all living species, and on diversity as the pattern of evolution to the present day.

Vanmechelen’s constantly varied depictions of the egg are layered with real feathers and scumbled pigment that looks like it has been applied with feathers, insisting that the chicken comes first in the fabrication of the artwork, even if the initial creative impulse is the idea of the work conceived in the mind. This double focus on different stages of growth in the avian species has been underlined by the addition of textual material. In one painting that features twin eggs, the phrase ‘abo ovo’ is superimposed in vividly glowing neon. The phrase refers back to Horace’s Ars Poetica which advises other poets not to begin their work with the beginning of the storyline but to commence ‘in medias res’. The beginning of the story of the Trojan War would be the birth of Helen and her twin Clytemnestra from a ‘double egg’, according to the Greek myth linking human origins to the

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COMBAT@CWRM, Installation view, Nieuwpoort (BE), 2014

reproductive system of another species. Vanmechelen has stated of his work that it is ‘a multifaceted experiment to grab the past in the present and tell tales about the future’, asserting the need for action in the present to be governed by an awareness of the past it has evolved from, as well as the precise nature of the future it must shape.

In the wild, chickens build nests, and the desire to nest is common to all hens, despite the malformation of their living conditions during the past century. Nesting is the most fundamental of those natural impulses frustrated by factory farming.

Vanmechelen’s nests are like impregnable fortresses, aggressively defensive structures large enough to protect giant birds—they compensate symbolically for the eradication of natural habitats in a biosphere controlled by human priorities.

In works such as ‘Carried by Generations’, fossil eggs are enclosed by nestlike structures woven from avian legs and feet. These materials may excite considerable aversion in viewers, yet the impulse to turn away is complicit with the tactics of an industry that destroys mobility in live animals and deletes the evidence by packaging meat with extremities removed. What we turn away from is what we conspire to ignore. The monstrous nest is like the transformation of a guilty memory, the more unsettling the more it has been repressed. Some of Vanmechelen’s most hauntingly beautiful works have involved nest installations, such as the dimly lit eyrie virtually entombed in a disused ammunition depot in Nieuwpoort. Here the nest is completely filled by an enormous stone egg guarded by live owls; their presence endows the egg with a dormant potency even though its petrified state is suggestive of having been laid in earliest times. What and when it might hatch is dependent on the nurture it has received or been denied.

The neon caption for the installation ‘( R ) EVOLUTION’ is indicative of its latent ambivalence in this regard.

DARWIN’S DREAM, Installation view, London (UK), 2014

The displacement of limbs into nest material connects with other kinds of disjunction between form and function, especially when transmutation is the result of conjoining human and animal body parts. There is a significant number of inter-species hybrids in Vanmechelen’s oeuvre, raising questions about partnership, common ancestry and ecological responsibility. The exploitation of one species by another involves the appropriation of biological resources; humans take what they need from chickens and other farmed animals, devaluing what remains. Recent history has shown the facility with which such manipulative relations can be transferred from our treatment of animals to that of other humans. Vanmechelen’s joint practices of grafting and cross-breeding work towards the confusion of such discriminatory mechanisms and towards the clarification of grounds for mutual respect and mutual gain. The momentum with which this artist sustains his extraordinarily wide range of activities is one measure of the urgency with which the tipping point between a history of ecological disaster and its reversal must be attained. Perhaps the most lucid exposition of this reversibility is the film projected as part of the installation ‘Darwin’s Dream’ which appears to record the methodical consumption by one man (the artist) of the meat of an entire chicken. The film is in fact shown in reverse so as to create the illusion of a chicken being made whole rather than being devoured. It provides the most economical illustration of the way Vanmechelen’s work prepares us for the future by drawing us back to the past, mirroring the dawn: a moment of true awakening.

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NATO A VENEZIA, Installation view, Palazzo Loredan, 54th biennial of Venice (IT), 2011

INTERVIEW Adriano Berengo and James Putnam

You have worked with Koen for many years, how did this working relationship begin? How have you been involved in Koen’s projects over the years, ranging from the start of the CCP to his forthcoming installations in Venice?

The encounter with Koen happened about 18 years ago, thanks to a client, a writer of children’s books Gregie de Maeyer, who had previously purchased a sculpture of Licata from us. One day, De Maeyer, who was going to the Bologna Illustrated Book Fair, introduced us to a young artist who illustrated children’s books. We know that, sometimes, children’s books are more useful to adults...

At the time Koen also carved beautiful wooden sculptures and, coming here to Murano met the glass master Danilo Zanella. It was the period when Koen was illustrating a book called “The Glass Child” and he explained to the master what characteristics this sculpture had to have. What I call ‘technician neurosis’ was born: the moment when those who work in glass, but anyone in general, tries to do his best to make a perfect and durable object. While Koen, on that occasion, wanted to make something a little ugly, a bit broken and tormented. His first adventure with glass was not easy.

The sculpture certainly achieved more success than the book that it was to illustrate. Our real encounter with his art, however, was through an humanitarian project which was coordinated by a group of doctors from Liege who sought to persuade some South African families to adopt orphaned children to tackle the poverty that hung over that country. So Koen, sensitive to the issue and eager to participate in this project, came to me with an egg with two solid iron legs. At that moment I thought I had had an epiphany and I offered to make a larger, transparent glass egg. Since then all of his initiatives have been characterized by the egg, all the way to the current project “The Walking Egg” which is, in effect, a metaphor of the fragility of the human being who to get ahead in life, needs two strong legs.

What has compelled you to work with Koen in glass and what importance do you think that the glass pieces hold in his overall practice?

For Koen it’s very important to use glass to create his works of art. There are two main reasons that lead him to always come back to Murano to grow as an artist: first, the collaboration with the glass master is essential for Koen, it’s a kind of marriage, an indispensable alliance from which arise the best works of art; and the other reason is that for him working with glass has to do with life, glass is a living material, it is like working with water that then becomes solid, with the 4 elements fused together. Murano for Koen (he said in a recent interview) is like paradise where something totally new has come to life. At the start of “CCP” there is precisely “The Walking Egg”.

Can you tell us about the concept of the forthcoming three-part project taking place in Murano (the cross between the dromedary, the mushroom and the chicken - with the restaurant).

Camel relief on the Palazzo Mastelli in Campo dei Mori, Venice (IT)

This project from Koen is really exceptional. It will be a task that will blow everyone’s mind. There is some evidence published in old Venetian books, which documents the presence of exotic animals in the lagoon city in the last centuries. But these are more unique than rare. However, there is a building in the historic center of Venice (Palazzo Mastelli in Campo dei Mori) which has a relief on the facade representing a camel; we like to think that maybe this is

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our only predecessor. Venice has in its DNA the distinction of being a place of crossings and exchanges, a city that has always gathered together different cultures and merged them into new hybrids. Right here, and for these reasons, Koen wanted to make this latest and perhaps most bold artistic project. Since “CCP” to today his interventions on the nature of different species are in effect works of art, however made with the fundamental contribution of scientists and geneticists that allow him to develop the initial idea. A dromedary will come to Murano and will be hosted in the area behind our furnace a few steps from the Museum where we will exhibit the works of GLASSTRESS. The presumption is that the dromedary has a very special immune system which is highly effective against viruses but its potential has not yet been fully made available to humans. If the immune system of the human being can undergo even a minimum change due to the chain dromedary-excrementmushrooms- eggs, then here there is material for a Nobel Prize. Art is the bridge between the species. The idea seems very simple: the dromedary will live on a surface of earth and grass, will eat and produce its droppings. These in turn nourish the soil where mushrooms will grow which will then be eaten by the free range hens, which in turn, will lay the eggs... This latest product, the final link of the chain, will be served in the restaurant with the mushrooms. It seems that the linkage dromedary-droppings-mushroom-egg guarantees the opportunity to pass on the dromedary’s immune system’s precious element.

Do you have any concerns about the live elements of the installation and how do you think that the public will respond to seeing this entire process first hand?

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, we are not new to these experiences. In 2011 the exhibition space of the Berengo Foundation on Murano saw the creation/birth of the offspring of the fifteenth chicken crossing between a male specimen of Egyptian origin and a Mechelse female. Every morning the bird got up early and sang, every day we had the police at the doors. They found it quite odd that a place designed to make glass and show contemporary art had a singing bird hanging around. It was not easy to confront this; we pushed the situation a step from the court: I was determined to hold up the independence and freedom of the artwork even in front of a judge.

If an artist reflects on life, on the changes, and on the roots of biology; the presence of living beings becomes indispensable. It’s needed to ‘prove’ that the idea is possible, real. The audience will be shaken and it certainly will not be easy to explain to customers the reasons for such a choice. In the long term, we will have the answers we seek: both from the public and the field of science.

a courageous and unique idea; it gives one a new chance to reflect. It stands as an allusion to social changes. This is the purpose of art. From the birth of the historical avant-garde, which is now about to turn one hundred years old, power lies in the artistic gesture, in the concept, assuming that the artist, through any object (a found object or an animal, as in this case) has something breaking to say. And this is the case for Koen. Which is why I supported this project: it’s foolish enough to make you think seriously.

Do you see the possibility of this project having an effect on humanity in the long term, in regards to the work that Koen is doing with scientists and the breakthroughs that they believe possible through this new version of cross breeding?

I will leave it to posterity to judge. We are facing an artistic proposal that is unprecedented and this, surely, will have a long-term effect: the audience, critics, and artists... everyone will remember this setting as something totally new. That this “works”, both on an experimental and a scientific point of view is what we all hope. I think Koen has the necessary elements to support his thesis even in the face of the detractors that we expect to come: suppositions of unfounded abuse from the animal right movement, scientists who cross their fingers behind their backs, artists and gallery owners who deny artistic validity of this project. In particular, the galleries will be embarrassed in front of this work: in fact they will not know what to sell, forgetting, however, that about half a century ago another large and rigorous artist had cleverly encapsulated his shit, every sample of which today is worth a fortune.

What is the importance and relevance for hosting the third part of the installation in the former Banca di Venezia (now part of the Palazzo Franchetti)? Do you see that the seeds and gene banks of various basic foods are a bank for future generations who could be ignorant of naturally produced grain, for example with the takeover by Monsanto?

The three projects together represent the stature of the artist with younger generation: genetic crosses and bio-cultural diversity are essential to our survival. On the third floor of Palazzo Franchetti, hundreds of seeds will be kept in glass containers, a gene bank of ancient plants and seeds that are essential for human nutrition. The seeds themselves are a bank, a guarantee for the future nutrition and well-being of the human species. On the walls the passports of all the different generations of Cosmopolitan Chickens will be displayed and, at the center, there will be a glass chick inside a black bronze hand, the warning for what is yet to come.

Do you believe that one’s immune system can be strengthened by becoming part of the experiment and eating the mushrooms that will be prepared by Slow Food in the restaurant segment of the project?

I’m not a scientist, and what I believe about it does not really matter much.

Mine is an act of faith in art and in particular in this artist. I believe a lot in Koen’s work because it is conducted and created with consistency and with extensive research, with the help of specialized geneticists. Often you look at the truth, the plausibility of an artistic proposal, and you lose the opportunity to see the metaphorical strength in it. I do not allude to the effectiveness of this project, I’m just saying that the main idea is strong and worth developing. It’s

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Koen Vanmechelen with glass master Silvano Signoretto and team at the furnace, Berengo Studio, Venice (IT), 2007

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Adriano Berengo, Venice (IT)

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COLOPHON

This book is published by the Open University of Diversity (BE) on the occasion of KOEN VANMECHELEN AWAKENER\LIFEBANK GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA (IT) 9 MAY – 22 NOV, 2015 Editors

James Putnam

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

Koen Vanmechelen Managing Editor

Goele Schoofs Texts Adriano Berengo Rod Mengham And the editors Photographs

Mine Dalemans Alex Deyaert Stoffel Hias Bert Janssen Inge Kindt Ivan Put Goele Schoofs Koen Vanmechelen Stephen White Map +fortuna Graphic design

Geoffrey Brusatto Printed by Albe de Coker All artworks

©Koen Vanmechelen ISBN 9789090290096

The artist would like to express special thanks to the State Hermitage Museum, Berengo Studio and Slow Food. Also to Albe de Coker, L’Uno Coll Altro, Romain Coenen, Chido Govera, The World Vegetable Center – AVRDC for their kind support of this exhibition. And to the editors who conceived and realized this very important book.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. © OpUnDi, 2015, Hasselt.

GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA PALAZZO FRANCHETTI, MURANO Curators

Dimitri Ozerkov and Adriano Berengo Project Management Director

Nadia Taiga Director Special Projects

Jane Rushton Executive Assistante

Anita Braghetta AWAKENER/LIFEBANK Vice President SLOW FOOD ITALIA

Cinzia Scaffidi BIO-FARM “IL ROSMARINO”

Piergiorgio Defilippi FOUNDER Vegetarian Haute Cuisine Restaurant Joia

Pietro Leemann Communication & Marketing

Mauro Zardetto Process Assistance

Giorgia Zardetto B Restaurant

Lorenzo and his team FONDAZIONE BERENGO President - Adriano Berengo Vice President - Loris Vianello BERENGO STUDIO Executive Director - Stefano Lo Duca Technical Director - Valter Marzaro Special thanks to glass maestros: Andrea Salvagno, Berengo Studio Silvano Signoretto, Berengo Studio STUDIO KOEN VANMECHELEN Process Manager - Goele Schoofs Production Manager - Renate Neven Copywriter - Peter Dupont Veterinarian - Theo Martens Installation team Mattijs Broux Rik Camps Rik Gielen Stoffel Hias Nectar Kiopektzis Jo Moors Kurt Moors Johan Paesen Maurice Schrooten

JAMES PUTNAM & JILL SILVERMAN VAN COENEGRACHTS GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA (IT) 9 MAY – 22 NOV, 2015