Fleischmaschine: Zero

 FLEISCHMASCHINE: ZERO

Robert Franciszty:

Through the staging of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the performance presents, on the one hand, slaughterhouses as contemporary concentration camps, symbolized through the meat grinder. On the other hand, roses (the installation Bread + Roses), whose petals the artist tears off and eats, are positioned as an ironic image of the culture of nonviolence.

At the end of the performance, the artist reads a poem that speaks about the kind of world in which we should — or perhaps must — live.

“Besides being distinguished by the name human, we also pride ourselves on being humane. What a splendid way to declare morality a characteristic of human nature — by using the name of our own species for merciful purposes! An animal obviously cannot be human, so how could it possibly be humane?”

Frans de Waal, Naturally Good