“Brainmeatwashing” consists of a series of sketches visualizing a succession of four spaces / rooms through which I am imagining the audience to follow an obligatory path, each room representing a sort of emblematic step in the food chain. Taken together, the four spaces are meant to constitute a large Pavlovian conditioning structure, which will induce in the unaware spectators / participants a conditioned nausea at the sight / smell of meat. For obvious reasons, the project remains as a sketch, impossible to realise. To “brainwash” means to pressurize someone into adopting some radically different beliefs, by using systematic and often forcible means. Often, the idea is to attempt, through prolonged stress, to break down an individual physical and mental defenses. The indoctrination performed by brainwashing is usually associated with military and political interrogations, and with religious conversion. Pavlovian conditioning can also be seen as a form of brainwashing. The reference to brainwashing in my art project is meant to highlight the fact that, as an artist, I am imagining to use some form of violence on the viewer, to force a change in beliefs.
The first room, the Labyrinth, involves restraints on the body, mimicking the restraints that livestock suffer during their short existence. The second room, the Foul Room, involves display and contact with bodily wastes, to mimic the degradation imposed on livestock because of overcrowding. The third room, the Kill Floor, will make the viewer experience the act of slaughtering. The fourth room, the Dinner Table, involves the display of the results of the slaughtering as dead matter / food.
Overall, the work aims at denouncing the atrocities perpetrated with the ‘machinization’ of the animals employed in the human food chain, possibly generating in the viewer an overwhelming feeling of disgust. The message that I would like to pass on the viewer is that, whenever meat is involved, the human food chain shows traits of abjection. The production of meat involves abject processes and the result of an abject act of production keeps an alo of abjection around it. Whenever we consume such a result, it becomes literally part of us, and the halo of abjection becomes part of us too.
