1 m2 & 1 min

Installation, DE-TOUR, Paleis van Mieris, Amsterdam, 2018
Photography by Charlott Markus

Two works, both related to the non- human animal, the chicken.

1 m2 is the representation of a cage that refers to 1 square meter of chicken in a Dutch Farm Factory. To have an understanding of the amount of space the chickens have, this cage is extrapolated to human size. In the industry one doesn’t talk about amount of bodies, but instead bodies are mentioned only as weight. On one square meter it is allowed to have a maximum of 42KG of chickens. Translated to human size this would mean a maximum of 1176KG of humans. This is approximately equivalent to 17 human bodies.

1 min consists of a pile of foam trays, which normally are used for packaging of chicken breasts. The amount of trays here represents the amount of chickens that are slaughtered every minute in the Netherlands. One tray per chicken, 1155 chickens per minute, to be precise.