IWY 14: GORGE - CHICKEN

23 March 2014
@ Apriary Studios, London

with Christa Holka, Dr Sharon Husbands, Alex and Daniel Eisenberg, Season Butler, and Johanna Linsley.

(Sorry, but you’re boring. You make me yearn for silence, for the absence of you.)

Gorge: Chicken is the second iteration of an ongoing project that brings bodies around a dinner table for a messy politically-charged encounter with other eating bodies.

(Do the chicken dance, you chicken.)

Why ‘Gorge’?

It’s like gorge yourself silly until the gorge rises and like: that’s gorge babes.

(It’s mean in the henhouse, as well as hot and loud and feathery.)

 Why ‘Chicken’?

It’s a bit stupid really.

And it’s like ‘chicken’ like sissy like shouting on the playground like the unwanted patron saint of queer kids.

(I hate to say it, but fear makes your face look puffy, indecision makes you smell funny.)

And it’s also like food and autobiography and how do we think about how we are what we eat without a horrible easy identification between food and empathy or universalism or cross-cultural tourism.

(It’s mean here, and you’re soft and easy and you’re bringing us down. You’re soft and we’re not.)

And it’s probably other things too. Like meat and how we get it. Like the poetry of the deep fryer. Like clucking and tutting – like gossip. Like closeness through memory.

So welcome and please enjoy.

(We’ll laugh at them won’t we. We’ll laugh and laugh.)

Text by Johanna Linsley.

Photos by Timothy Smith and Christa Holka.