Not to Be Mistaken Koen Vanmechelen by Koen Vanmechelen

KOEN VANMECHELEN

NOT TO BE MISTA KEN

LABIOMISTA Press

KOEN VANMECHELEN

NOT TO BE MISTA KEN 1986 — 2021

Curated by

Didi Bozzini

LABIOMISTA Press

Sketch, 2019 Venice (IT)

WORKS EXHIBITIONS LABIOMISTA

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ANTHOLOGY CURRICULUM VITAE

227 267

KOEN VANMECHELEN: NOT TO BE MISTAKEN History and Art criticism have always sorted artworks in accordance to the concept of style. Primitive, mannerist, realist, romantic, symbolist, expressionist, minimalist, abstract, every work labelled so as to be made easily recognizable, and every author put inside a box. Nowadays, given that matters of style and styles have gotten noticeably more complicated, critics have conjured up a theoretical container, one with enough space to somehow accommodate everything that does not fit the established categories: conceptualism. As a result, Koen Vanmechelen’s complex body of work is often defined as the production of a conceptual artist, with the most rushed disregard for the fact that his pieces range from informal painting to neoclassical sculpture, from baroque glasswork to realist photography to documentary filmmaking, to an agricultural firm or a scientific publication. And, naturally, this summary classification ends up being much more puzzling than helpful when attempting to access his multiform creative universe. In reality, if one truly wished to get in Vanmechelen’s world from the front door, any kind of stylistic concern and all formal preconceptions should be left behind. His work is not ascribable to a school, to a group or a manner, nor, least of all, would it be fitting to sum up his every effort within the means of expression he utilized to carry it out. Koen Vanmechelen is an artist in his own kind of way – original, different from anyone else – and his ends, as well as the instruments he employs to attain them, cut widely across the strict domain of aesthetics. The object of his art is the relationship between Nature and Culture. His aim is to nurture it and elevate it through an ethic/poetic operation that could potentially transform reality. Sensation and knowledge, art and science, natural experimentation and social action are the ingredients that merge within the substance of his endeavour. And, like Nature – which ignores style – his art manifests itself through a proliferation of various and different forms, giving way to a unicum, a Gesamtkunstwerk that is hardly definable by traditional labels. Make no mistake, though. The work of this self-taught eclectic being new, out of the box and strictly linked to cultural and societal issues of today does not mean such work is not also deeply rooted in art history. His imaginary hangs around Beuys’ shamanic performances and Bosch’s chimeras, just as well as Warhol’s all-encompassing vision, Brueghel’s figures and Smithson’s environmental installations, but is just as much familiar with Rubens’ painting or Bernini’s sculpture. Truly, make no mistake. For the multiplicity of his sources of inspiration and references is purely freedom of expression, and not uncertainty in style. In fact, Vanmechelen has undertaken a global project of regeneration – which could be defined as leonardesque – whereby art and beauty are not the aim, but just the most efficient instrument. This volume includes fragments and memories of the thirty-year-long journey that saw Koen Vanmechelen create his first assemblages in the ‘80s – using salvaged materials from a disused chicken coop – carry on a vast program of poultry hybridization, and eventually open LABIOMISTA, the great park for biocultural diversity inaugurated in Genk in 2019. It is a story of phantasies and intuitions, studies and inventions, encounters and collaborations. A story of men and animals, of travels to either the far ends of our planet or the four corners of the atelier, of discoveries and unexpected creations. The story of an artist who found the secret of fertility in diversity and, within it, the very reason for being of his artwork.

Didi Bozzini curator

Former studio, 1994 Oudsbergen (BE)

WORKS

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1. WORKS

Cytoskeleton, 1986 wood, paraffin, charcoal, acryl paint, screws variable dimensions

Virtual Fighter, 2018 Statuario marble 71 × 123 × 50 cm

Black Medusa, 2015 Black marble, taxidermy chickens (CCP), taxidermy snakes 76 × 43 × 32 cm

Cheetah, 2015 Taxidermy swan wing, taxidermy cheetah, statuario marble 100 × 138 × 40 cm 100 × 138 × 40 cm

Domestic Giant, 2015 Bronze, glass, silvered taxidermy chicken feet 45 × 175 × 85 cm 40 × 174 × 87 cm

Temptation, 2018 Statuario marble, taxidermy crocodile, taxidermy Reeves’s Pheasant, ostrich eggshell 54 × 41 × 41 cm

Protected Paradise, 2020 Taxidermy griffon vulture, Carrara White marble 85 × 173 × 166 cm

Labiomista, 2020 Multimedia work on canvas, neon, glass mask, egg, taxidermy shield lizard and guinea fowl, black goose feathers, cord 200 × 160 × 47 cm

New Generation, 2020 Multimedia work on canvas, glass mask, neon, taxidermy Golden pheasant, guinea fowl feathers 200 × 160 × 43 cm

Do Not Argue - D.N.A., 2020 Taxidermy pigs (LUCY), glass, cord 87 × 223 × 85 cm

Fables and Fantasies, 2020 Venetian pillow, glass, taxidermy ibis 22 × 53 × 46 cm

Fables and Fantasies, 2020 Venetian pillow, taxidermy chicks (CCP), silvered inox ball and cross 55 × 47 × 25 cm

Salvator Globe, 2012 Taxidermy chickens (CCP), stainless steel 110 × 110 × 87 cm

Uncomfortable, 2020 Pink marble 50 × 34 × 30 cm

Therianthropy, 2018 Taxidermy Serval cat, taxidermy turkey wings, glass, stainless steel 105 × 115 × 106 cm

Therianthropy, 2019 Taxidermy chameleons, glass, stainless steel, 41 × 17,5 × 18,5 cm

Golden Cord, 2019 Bronze finished with patina, gold leaf 17,5 × 75,5 × 46 cm

Golden Cord, 2019 Bronze finished with patina, gold leaf 100 × 24 × 49,5 cm

Golden Cord, 2019 Bronze finished with patina, gold leaf 28,5 × 65,5 × 21,5 cm

Carried by Generations, 2011 Taxidermy chicken feet, fossil dinosaur egg 28 × 26 × 16 cm

Natural Knowledge, 2016 Encyclopedia of human rights, the accident publication, the walking egg publication, taxidermy chicken feet, wood, gold ring 50 × 30 × 20 cm

Unicorn, 2013 Taxidermy llama, glass panel, wooden trestle 233 × 150 × 110 cm

CCPPCC/PCCCCP, 2016 Neon, acrylic 107 × 183 × 1 cm

Cosmopolitan Fossil - C.C.P., 2021 Red marble, taxidermy lizard 83 × 38 × 49 cm

Evolution II, 2018 Mixed media on canvas (Indian powders, eggyolk, feathers (CCP), grain, pencil, chalk, varnish, coffee) 490 × 320 cm

Evolution I, 2018 Mixed media on canvas (Indian powders, eggyolk, feathers (CCP), grain, pencil, chalk, varnish, coffee) 490 × 320 cm

No title (collage), 2012 Mixed media on drawing paper (charcoal, Indian powders, feathers CCP, coffee), print transparant film, wooden and glass frame 52,8 × 52,8 cm

No title (collage), 2011 Mixed media on drawing paper (charcoal, Indian powders, feathers CCP, coffee), print transparant film, wooden and glass frame 60,4 × 50,5 cm

No title (painting), 2019 Mixed media on canvas (chalk, coffee, Indian powders, eggyolk, pencil, varnish, feathers (CCP), pheasant feathers, print on plexiglass, neon) 200 × 150 cm

Labiomista, 2014 Mixed media on canvas (neon, building plans, print on plexiglass, chalk, pencil, varnish, coffee, llama fur, feathers (CCP), eggshell) 160 × 200 cm

No title (painting), 2019 Mixed media on canvas (chalk, coffee, Indian powders, eggyolk, pencil, varnish, feathers CCP, eagle feathers, neon) 290 × 932 cm

Collective Memory, 2019 Collage (mixed media on drawing paper; charcoal, Indian powders, pencil, feathers CCP, coffee, print on transparant film), wooden and glass frame 43 × 45 cm

No title (painting), 2019 Mixed media on canvas (print on plexi, grain, Indian powders, taxidermy feathers, paint, egg yolk, chalk, pencil, coffee, varnish) 200 × 150 cm

No title (painting), 2017 Mixed media on canvas (print on plexi, grain, Indian powders, taxidermy feathers, paint, egg yolk, chalk, pencil, llama wool, alpaca wool, eggshells, coffee, varnish, neon) 200 × 150 cm 54

Turbulence, 2016 Lightbox (UV print on polyester fabric, steel, lightning) 310 × 580 × 12 cm

Mechelse Senegal - CCP16 (Mechelse Fayoumi - CCP15 × Poulet de Senegal), 2012 Lambda print 2× (100 × 100 cm)

LUCY (Mangalica × Duroc), 2016 Lambda print 2× (100 × 100 cm)

PROOVO (Common King), 2021 Lambda print 2× (100 × 100 cm)

Shaman, 2017 Lambda print, wooden frame 213 × 153 × 10 cm

It doesn’t always have to be black, 2015 Lambda print 210 × 140 cm

Awakener/Lifebank, 2014 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, LED lighting) 200 × 450 × 10 cm

LUCY, 2018 Lightbox (Aluminium frame, UV-Print on Polyester fabric, LED lighting) 400 × 600 cm

Symbiosis, 2008 Lambda print 120 × 120 cm

EXHIBITIONS

Modified Spaces – C.C.P., 2011 (detail) 4th triennial of Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art (CN)

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Performance, De Kooi, 1998 ‘t Waaigat and Vrije Val, Antwerp (BE) together with Gregie de Maeyer

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Mechelse Bresse, 2000 Storm Centers, Poëziezomer van Watou (BE) Curated by Jan Hoet and Gwy Mandelinck

First Generation Blue, 1999 In de Ban van de Ring, Provinciaal Museum, Hasselt (BE) Curated by Annemie Van Laethem and Erik Croux

The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 1999 La Feuille d’Or, Dilsen-Stokkem (BE)

Performance 83 Blood and Colours, 2000 Berengo Studio 1989, Film festival Cinecittà, Venice (IT)

Koen Vanmechelen with Walking Egg, 1999 Rooftop Berengo Studio, Venice (IT)

Artificial Crossbreeding, 2002 Berengo Studio 1989, Miami Art Fair (US)

Genetic Genius, 2001 Secret Gardens, Oud-Rekem (BE) Curated by Annemie Van Laethem and Erik Croux

Koen Vanmechelen and Adriano Berengo, 2002 Berengo Studio 1989, Miami Art Fair (US)

Between natural breeding and genetic engineering, 2000 Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE) Curated by Jo Coucke

The Accident, 2006 Berengo Studio 1989, Palm Court, Miami (US) Curated by Agnes Husslein-Arco

Mechelse Orloff - Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, 2009 Against Exclusion, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moskou (RU) Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and Tijs Visser

Curator Agnes Husslein-Arco and Koen Vanmechelen, 2006 Miami (US)

Salvator Globe, 2008 Poëziezomer van Watou (BE) Curated by Jan Hoet, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Gwy Mandelinck

Lab, 2008 Betrekkelijk rustig, Oud-Rekem (BE) Curated by Annemie Van Laethem and Erik Croux

Combat, 2012 Landcommandery Alden-Biesen, Bilzen (BE) Curated by Lut Maris

Totemcity, 2008 World Economic Forum, Davos (CH), Berengo Studio 1989 Curated by Hilde & Klaus Schwab The Chicken’s Appeal, 2008 Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (NL) Curated by Frank van de Schoor

Breaking the Cage, 2008 Sara Sist, Adriano Berengo Koen Vanmechelen and Inge Kindt, Art and Business, Victoria and Albert Museum Curated by Mike Phillips

The Chicken’s Appeal, 2008 Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (NL) Curated by Frank van de Schoor

The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2009 Connor Contemporary Art, Washington DC (US) Curated by Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith

The Chicken’s Appeal, 2008 Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (NL) Curated by Frank van de Schoor

The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2010 Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam (NL) Curated by Tino Haenen

Domestication, 2010 Gallery West, The Hague (NL) Curated by Marie-José Sondeijker 100

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Unicorn, 2009 GLASSTRESS, Scuola Grande di San Teodoro, 53rd International Biennial of Venice (IT) Curated by Laura Mottioli Rossi and Rosa Barovier Mentasti

Connection, 2009 Sint-Lukasgalerie, Brussels (BE) Curated by Filip Luyckx

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The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - In Transit, 2010 Tous Ensemble, Dak’Art Biennial, in collaboration with ArtAids Foundation (Han Nefkens), Dakar (SN) Curated by Stef Van Bellingen

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Jan Hoet and Francis Feidler during the debate ‘Breaking the Cage’, IKOB, Eupen (BE), 2011

Golden Nica Hybrid Art, 2013 Prix Ars Electronica, Linz (AT)

CC®P – The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2013 Cyberarts Festival, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz (AT) Curated by Genoveva Rückert and Emiko Ogawa

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Breaking the Cage, 2011 IKOB, Eupen (BE) Curated by Francis Feidler

Golden Spur, COMBAT, 2012 Landcommandery Alden Biesen, Bilzen (BE) Curated by Lut Maris

Hybridity in Art and Science, 2012 The Worldly House, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (DE) Curated by Tue Greenfort, inspired by the work of Donna Haraway

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Modified Spaces – C.C.P., 2011 4th triennial of Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art (CN) Curated by dr. Luo Yiping and Peter Noever

Some make – Some take, 2007 Guy Pieters Gallery, Art Köln, Keulen (DE)

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Modified Spaces – C.C.P., 2011 4th triennial of Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art (CN) Curated by dr. Luo Yiping and Peter Noever

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Hotel de Inmigrantes – Cosmopolitan Stranger, 2012 Open University of Diversity (Collateral event Manifesta 9), Hasselt (BE) Curated by Tomasz Wendland, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Koen Vanmechelen

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Hotel de Inmigrantes – Cosmopolitan Stranger, 2012 Open University of Diversity (Collateral event Manifesta 9), Hasselt (BE) Curated by Tomasz Wendland, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Koen Vanmechelen

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Global Artist’s Award, 2013 Evolution of a Hybrid, Pavilion 0, Venice (IT) Curated by Tomasz Wendland

Evolution of a Hybrid, 2013 BEAF13, Bozar, Brussel (BE) Curated by Christophe De Jaeger

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Leaving Paradise, 2013 Art Sanya, Hainan Island (CN) Curated by Xu Gang

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Protected Paradise, 2013 Guy Pieters Gallery, Saint Paul de Vence (FR)

Christo and Koen Vanmechelen, 2013 Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke (BE)

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Under my Skin and Patience - C.C.P., 2013 White light/White Heat, Glasstress, Biennial of Venice (IT) Curated by James Putnam

LABIOMISTA, 2014 The Green Light District, Budafabriek, Kortrijk, (BE) Curated by Christophe De Jaeger

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Arena de Evolución, 2015 12th la Bienal de La Habana (CU) Curated by Jorge Fernandez Torres

Never Green - C.C.P., 2014 Rurart, Poitiers (FR) Curated by James Chaigneaud

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LIFEBANK/AWAKENER, 2015 Curated by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts and James Putnam GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA, curated by Dimitri Ozerkov and Adriano Berengo, Berengo Studio, Murano, 56th Biennial of Venice (IT)

Performance LIFEBANK/AWAKENER with chef Pietro Leemann, 2015 B Restaurant, Murano, 56th Biennial of Venice (IT)

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Darwin’s Dream, 2014 The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church, London (UK) Curated by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts and James Putnam

LABIOMISTA, 2015 Exo-Evolution, Globale 2015, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (DE) Curated by Peter Weibel and Sabiha Keyif

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Golden Cord, 2019 Linda & Guy Pieters Foundation, Saint-Tropez (FR)

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This is Not a Chicken, 2015 Het Domein, Sittard (NL) Curated by Roel Arkesteijn

ENERGY/MASS, 2016 Wasserman Projects, Detroit (US) Curated by Alison Wong and Gary Wasserman

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ENERGY/MASS, 2016 Wasserman Projects, Detroit (US) Curated by Alison Wong and Gary Wasserman

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Carried by Generations, 2017 Force of Nature, The Art Pavilion, Mile End Park, London, (UK) Curated by James Putnam

ComingWorldRememberMe, 2014-2018 Landart installation, Palingbeek Ypres (BE) Curated by Jan Moeyaert

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Planetary Community Chicken, 2017 VII Socle du Monde, HEART, Herning, Denmark (DK) Curated by Olivier Varenne and Holger Reenberg

Chido Govera, 2016 Future of Hope Foundation, Open Global Farm, Harare (ZW)

Planetary Community Chicken, 2016 National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (ZW) Curated by Raphael Chikukwa

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Leaving Paradise, 2013 CONNERSMITH, Washington (US) Curated by Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith

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Protected Paradise - C.C.P., 2015 Vienna for Art’s Sake, Winterpalais Prinz Eugen, Belvedere, Vienna (AT) Curated by Peter Noever and Agnes Husslein-Arco

Protected Paradise, 2017 GLASSTRESS, Palazzo Franchetti, La Biennale di Venezia (IT) Curated by Dimitri Ozerkov and Adriano Berengo

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Incubated Worlds, 2018 International Livestock Research Institute, Addis Ababa (ET)

Book of Genome, 2018 Permanent collection, National Museum of Ethiopia Official hand over with Dr. Siboniso Moyo (ILRI), Olivier Hanotte (ILRI), Tadelle Dessie (ILRI), Yonas Desta (General Manager National Museum), Gebregziabher Gebreyohannes (State Minister at the Ministry of Agriculture) and Koen Vanmechelen

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It’s About Time, 2018 Serlachius Museum, Mäntta (FI) Curated by Timo Valjakka

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It’s About Time, 2018 Serlachius Museum, Mäntta (FI) Curated by Timo Valjakka

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Human Rights House, 2019 Permanent installation, Tulum (MX)

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Press conference, The Worth of Life, 2019 Teatro dell’architettura, Mendrisio (CH) Curated by Didi Bozzini

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The Worth of Life, 2019 Teatro dell’architettura, Mendrisio (CH) Curated by Didi Bozzini

Between Jungle and Civilization, 2020 Mirrors of Time, Kasteel Oud-Rekem (BE) Curated by Annemie Van Laethem and Erik Croux

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LABIOMISTA

162 — 225

1. WORKS

Breaking the Cage LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

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Diversity, 2016 CosmOpolitan Gallery, Genk (BE) Curated by Yannick Nijs and Luc Vrielinck

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Architect Mario Botta and Koen Vanmechelen at The Battery, 2017

The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, exterior view on The Looking glass (green house), LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2018

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Collective Memory, Turbulence, installation view beneath The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2018

The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, exterior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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Myths and Medicine, underneath The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

The Battery, View on Monumentum (eagle cage), LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2018

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The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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The Battery - Studio Koen Vanmechelen, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

Press conference opening LABIOMISTA with minister Ben Weyts, mayor Wim Dries, Koen Vanmechelen and architect Mario Botta, The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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The Battery - Studio Koen Vanmechelen, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

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KITOVU, 2016 plexi, neon, masaai fabric, horns, cowhide, ropes, nametag, 64,5 × 33 × 76,5 cm The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

Medusa, The Battery Studio Koen Vanmechelen, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

Tadelle, 2018 Taxidermy lion, Iran yellow marble, Belgian black marble, 140 × 60 × 200 cm The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

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The Battery – Studio Koen Vanmechelen, exterior view on The Looking glass (green house), LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

The Looking Glass, The Battery, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2018

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Paradise Lost, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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Exterior view on The Ark, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019 Villa OpUnDi, exterior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

Joy and Wisdom, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

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UBUNTU, Villa OpUnDi, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

Wunderkammer, Villa OpUnDi, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

UBUNTU, Villa OpUnDi, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

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Frozen Culture, Villa OpUnDi, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

Library of Collected Knowledge (L.O.C.K.), Villa OpUnDi, interior view, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

David Walsh, founder MONA (Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania) visiting Villa OpUnDi, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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Uncomfortable, 2020 Marble, 225,6 × 153 × 151 cm, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

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Musical performance Michel Bisceglia, LabOvo, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020 Llama Winter, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

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Book of Genomes, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

T-Rex, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

Llama Winter, WINTER’S KILOBYTES × WE (WkxW), LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

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Collective Memory, dedicated to Inge Kindt, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

Protected Paradise, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

Black Stork Baby, Protected Paradise, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

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Gallo Galloways, Protected Paradise, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

Protecting the Other, 2020 Marble, gold leaf, 205 × 163 × 56 cm, Protected Paradise, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

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Integration, 2020 Stainless steel, bronze, gold leaf 190 × 206 × 120 cm - 400 × 200 × 160 cm LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE)

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Cosmogolem Connekt, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

Collective Memory Day of the Cosmogolem, celebrating children rights, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

Cosmogolem, Day of the Cosmogolem, celebrating children rights, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019

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LaMouseion, Protected Paradise, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

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Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

MECC, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2020

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Instead of Sleeping, Cosmopolitan Culture Park, LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2021

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Nomadland, meeting place and community project adjacent to LABIOMISTA, 2019

The Worth of Life, Nomadland, 2021

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Koen Vanmechelen painting in The Battery, his studio

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Koen Vanmechelen at work in The Battery, his studio

Life roll, 2013 Taxidermy alligator, ceramic egg 36 × 75 × 49 cm LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE) 214

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Performance, The Worth of Life, 2020 Open Global Farm, Oudsbergen (BE)

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The Battery - Studio Koen Vanmechelen, Interior view, 2019

Koen Vanmechelen working in the glass furnace of Berengo Studio, 2020

Koen Vanmechelen at work in The Battery, his studio, 2019

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LABIOMISTA, 2018 Performance, Open Global Farm, Oudsbergen (BE)

Open Global Farm, Oudsbergen (BE)

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Perfect Strangers, citizen science/art project, LABIOMISTA (BE) - Het Domein (NL), 2017

The Worth of Life, performance, documentary Wild Gene, Open Global Farm, Oudsbergen (BE), 2019

CC®P, scientific research, Open Global Farm, Oudsbergen (BE), 2009

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Cosmocafe’s as part of the Human Rights Pavilion, 2019-2020, from left to right; Tokyo (JP), Leuven (BE), Venice (IT), LABIOMISTA (BE), Sydney (AU), Pretoria (SA), Vienna (AT), Manttä (FI), LABIOMISTA (BE), Brussels (BE), Den Haag (NL), Tulum (MX), Cape Town (SA), Santiago (CL), Harare (ZW), Addis Ababa (ET)

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ANTHOLOGY 2001 — 2019

2001 Christine Vuegen The Cosmopolitan Chicken The Limburg artist Koen Vanmechelen is working on the great breeding project ‘The Cosmopolitan Chicken’. This Cosmopolitan Chicken will unite all chickens by cross-breeding chicken breeds from different countries. The chicken world of course is a metaphor for the human world. The on-going project whips up discussions about globalisation, racism, genetic manipulation, and a lot more. Artists have staged living animals before. We all know the parrots of Marcel Broodthaers, the coyote of Joseph Beuys or the pigs of Wim Delvoye. What Koen Vanmechelen does is unseen. One could say that he’s extending the Creation. And he’s using a medium everybody knows. The chicken is at home on all continents. Of course, the Cosmopolitan Chicken embodies an utopia. But this is not at all a morbid experiment to breed some sort of Überhuhn. The Cosmopolitan Chicken is a super bastard. A bastard is stronger as striving for purity of race often leads to breeding-in, disease, and weakness in general. ‘Cross-breeding is the one thing’ says Koen Vanmechelen and he continues ‘we need to cross-breed across the boundaries if we want the world not to perish. We need to think cosmopolitical. Nothing is as beautiful as joining with other cultures and taking energy from this’. The chicken demonstrates the madness of ‘Own people first’ and other slogans of the extreme right wing. We should not forget that we are bastards ourselves, the result of many cross-breedings. For his first cross-breeding, Koen Vanmechelen chose the Mechelse Koekoek, the pride of Flemish chicken breeding and relative in name to the artist. The Poulet de Bresse is a first-rate French chicken. Their cross-breeding, the Mechelse Bresse, was presented in 1998 at the group show ‘In de ban van de ring’ in Hasselt. Last summer, this chicken was invited by Jan Hoet to his exhibition in Watou. In that Flemish village near the French border, where visual arts and poetry meet each summer, the Mechelse Bresse united Belgium and France. It was at that time, that the Cosmopolitan Chicken was presented for the very first time. Afterwards the Mechelse Bresse went to London, to the Lisson Gallery, to be cross-bred with the English Redcap. This once successful race is nowadays more or less infertile. By cross-breeding with fresh blood it is fertile again. ‘This may say something about England as an island,’ states the artist. ‘After many years of isolation you get to deal with phenomena such as the Redcap’. Behind the artist’s home an American cock is getting ready to breed with the Mechelse Redcap: which unites Belgian, French, and English nationalities. The American Jersey Giant is – no surprises there - the biggest chicken on earth. The hatching will be shown in America as soon as the right opportunity shows up. Only in case a border is being crossed, the artist indeed shows the whole breeding process, from the hatching of the eggs until the breaking out of the chicks. More cross-breedings are to be foreseen with the Dresdner Huhn, the Dutch Uilebaard, and a Brazilian chicken (a samba chicken, as points out the artist). ‘I am fascinated by the fact that people have bred such chickens. It says something about the origin and the existence of their national conscience. In those chickens one may find the characteristics of a nation’. Only in Africa the artist did not find a ‘national’ chicken. Perhaps there is no such thing as appropriation. Chickens are eaten there but are no symbol of status. All current chicken breeds originate from the first, primitive chicken, the Red Jungle Fowl, that still lives near the Himalaya. In Nepal, Koen Vanmechelen could film a Red Jungle Fowl family. As contrasted with domesticated chickens, the Red Jungle Fowl is monogamous. As the fowl still lives in the wild, monogamy may be even a stronger characteristic than the polygamous element. Constantly surprising turns occur in the project. In Hasselt, on the day of the eclipse of the sun, a black cock was born. In London, he invariably picked the same chicken. Pure chance or restauration of lost qualities? The super bastard or Cosmopolitan Chicken is no return to the primitive fowl, but a new start. ‘How she will look like is not important’ says the artist. ‘She will get another sort of beauty. She will have all genes of all chickens in the world. It is an ideal and like all ideals it will be full of deficiencies. The chicken is a living work of art, that is ready for something new. The artist’s role is almost gone. Everything is on the move. It is a perpetuum mobile’. The chicken is hybrid as is the oeuvre of Koen Vanmechelen. Before he started this overwhelming project, he made wood constructions, assembled figures, poultry, and cages, 229

somehow in the tradition of the Belgian assemblage artists. The chicken and the egg, the cage the chick breaks out from, were never far away. Koen Vanmechelen has been busy with chickens and pheasants all his life. In Murano, he has let glass eggs been blown that he gave iron feet. Until recently, the artist as a cook was creating desserts for a restaurant. Nowadays, he is entirely devoted to the chicken breeding project that spins off into video installations, collages and drawings, photographs etc. and he continues to make glass sculptures. Last but not least, the chicken has found its way to the sciences. Together with Dr. Ombelet, a gynaecologist, the artist publishes The Walking Egg, an English magazine in which ethicists, philosophers, and scientists debate about all sorts of procreation items. Koen Vanmechelen joins in with artistic reflections. The Cosmopolitan Chicken has nothing to do with cloning, but it goes without saying that the artist follows with great interest and attention those congresses. ‘The chicken wants to be in the middle of natural breeding and genetic manipulation’ he says. ‘We should never forget the natural breeding. It is full of surprises’.

2001 Filip Luyckx The Cosmopolitan Chicken The exhibition In de Ban van de Ring (in the Proviciaal Centrum voor Beeldende Kunsten Beguinage in Hasselt (Belgium, June-September 1999) certainly helped to give publicity to Koen Vanmechelen’s chicken-breeding project. Both S.M.A.K.-director Jan Hoet and the Lisson Gallery were quick to see the implications of his artistic position. As a result, he took part in the exhibitions Watou 2000 in Belgium and A Shot in the Head in the Lisson Gallery in London. His work raises a great number of ethical questions, but spectators should make a thorough inquiry into it beforehand. As a small boy already, the artist was deeply fascinated by chickens. Their plumage, their mating behaviour, their laying and hatching of eggs left a lasting mark on his young imagination. The cackling farmyard bird has many anthropoid characteristics: they are bipeds that make fruitless attempts to fly, they invoke the sun and the moon, and they are rather preoccupied with reproduction. These early birds, which originally lived in the wild at the foot of the Himalayas, gradually managed to secure their place at man’s side. During the Neolithic revolution, our ancestors started to domesticate them and they could be found all over the world. This internationalisation avant-la-lettre was carried to such extremes that most cultures no longer knew any wild specimens. Communication problems between the different continents created lots of different local breeds. Because of their double function of food provider and pet, chickens were within the reach of the common man. During wartime, working-class families experienced first-hand what a difference a few chickens could make to their diet. In the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, popular-education programmes, imbued with nationalism, extolled the qualities of indigenous chicken breeds, as one more reason for chauvinism besides idolatry of great artists and sportsmen. At the Brussels World Exhibition of 1958, Belgium glowed with national pride with its Mechelse Koekoek. Vanmechelen builds on an age-old heritage of domestication processes. His considerably accelerated breeding programme, though, has the deliberate aim of producing a Super Bastard, a cosmopolitan hybrid of typical national breeds. When the artist talks about gene art, he implies that his working material consists of living animals. Crossbreeding This could be compared to the traditional painter, who drew his pigments from vegetal and mineral sources in order to imitate the forms of the world. Vanmechelen does no more than consciously bring together different cocks and hens to crossbreed them. Direct genetic interventions are absolutely out of the question. Once Vanmechelen has put two breeds together, he allows nature to run its course. He does, however, intervene with artificial methods to hatch the eggs. The eggs are incubated for eighteen days at a temperature of 38° C and a humidity of 40%. Thereafter they are moved to a hatching machine for three days, where the humidity amounts to 80%. The eggs in the hatching machine need to be turned every day to remain 230

viable. Here, man takes over the instinctive task of the connoisseur. During those 21 days, the yolk turns into a chick. Meanwhile, in a membrane between the yolk and the egg white, an air chamber is formed which fills one third of the egg. The egg white which serves as food gradually runs out. This is the crucial moment when the chick has to break out of its shell. As the air supply is also limited, speed is essential. A strong shell offers protection, but can also mean an early death of the newcomer. The newly-hatched chicks are kept in brooding boxes under heat lamps for three weeks. The initial temperature of 32° C is gradually decreased to 20° C. At that point, the little chickens are moved into bigger indoor pens, where they have more room. Thereafter they are kept indoor, at room temperature, for another three weeks or so, before they are allowed into the chicken run. From then on they are exposed to all kinds of weather throughout the year, Vanmechelen wants his animals to stand on their own feet as quickly as possible. The life of his crossbreeds is entirely identical to the life of all other chickens, except for the fact that they end up in the artistic circuit instead of the economic breeding system. The artist has no intention whatsoever of boosting the laying or meat capacity of his chickens. His only interest being his artistic project: he wants to cross a typical indigenous chicken breed of each country with that of another country, which should eventually produce a Super Bastard which symbolically unites the whole world. Inbreeding The distinct breeding characteristics will hardly matter in the end. Vanmechelen does not intend to wipe out current chicken breeds and replace them by one uniform hybrid. On the contrary, what he wants to achieve is precisely a multiplication of breeds. Each crossbreeding process results in a new bastard breed which is partly used in The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, but which will also live as a separate entity. It is common knowledge that bastards have a tougher constitution than pure-breeds. To avoid inbreeding, the artist sets out several independent breeding lines in each stage of the project. This means that similar experiments take place in parallel circuits, which are destined to cross each other sooner or later. This obviously produces a surplus of both original pure-breeds and cross-breeds. All these spare chickens can count on the same animal-friendly treatment. Some may end up in the casserole, but that is also the fate of many free-range chickens on a farmyard. Vanmechelen sticks to clear ethical principles. No-one with a scientific or economic goal would ever start and keep up a project like this. The Super Bastard is a metaphor of human evolution, both cultural and genetic. Mixing yields new breeds, who turn out to be just as resilient as the old ones. We often do not realise that today’s breeds are the result of centuries of crossbreeding. Nevertheless there are few genetic differences amongst all these breeds. The artist is very careful not to identify his Super Bastard with an idealised image. Maybe the end result will be a hideous creature, who could in turn carry the seeds of a miraculous evolution. His project dissociates itself from experiments aimed at upgrading animals or refining the human race. Attempts to produce offspring from the genetic material of Nobel Prize winners and supermodels have all been disappointing. Intelligent beauty may beget ugly stupidity, and vice versa. Not to forget that every culture and age has different ideals. Moreover, such preconceived ideals ignore the fact that society must function as an organic entity, in which ordinary people turn out to be just as essential as Nobel Prize winners and supermodels. Real progress lies precisely in showing respect for ordinary people and the ordinary chicken, in all its diversity. All Vanmechelen aims to do, is to assist the natural mating process. He gives free rein to the unpredictability of nature. The artist never knows beforehand which type of chicken his breeding will shield. Commitment But how can we interpret this chicken-breeding project in the context of contemporary art? Being the son of a sculptor, Vanmechelen began putting together cages at an early age. Later, the poultry theme found its way into his sculptures and glass art. It was not an evident decision for him to consider living chickens as art, but it was the logical result of a lingering passion. Apart from the ultimate goal, we should not underestimate the dynamics involved in the process. A project as the Cosmopolitan Chicken requires considerable energy and organisational talent. It will take years to produce the Cosmopolitan Chicken. Each crossbreeding unites two or more countries, yielding a distinct variety with its own atypical characteristics. And each variety, it is accompanied by an unconventional exhibition that introduces a live art process to a museum or a gallery. Participation in this project requires a great deal of com231

mitment on account of the institution involved, as the eggs need to be turned every day and the chicks need feeding. The breeding process will have to rely on many volunteers. In fact, it is already doing so. Although the works of art only have a limited life, both the intermediary breeds and the Super Bastard will be able to reproduce endlessly. This art will therefore always appear in a living shape and relies on the commitment of the holder. The work continues to evolve without the artist. This calls to mind Joseph Beuys who integrated evolving material in his installations. But in the case of Vanmechelen, it concerns living beings, animals who share some characteristics with man, and who require constant care. His materials are not explicitly aesthetic in themselves. His art depends on our ability to attribute an aesthetic value to the crossbreeds. Every now and then, an exceptional specimen will see the light, and perhaps even a blue chicken. Each presentation of the work in a new country will spark off an ethical debate and set people thinking about miscegenation, globalisation, animal welfare, and genetic manipulation in humans and animals. This kind of art may capture the interest of a broad public. In the same manner that all chickens in the project are accorded equal respect, all the sections of the population can participate in the ethical debate. This debate will be held worldwide, which is imperative these days, as the questions involved requires global answers. It was no coincidence that the Mechelse Bresse, the cross between the Belgian Mechelse Koekoek and the French Poulet de Bresse, was presented in the border village of Watou. Of course the bastard has characteristics of both its parents, but a cross between the same pair of birds can produce offspring with very different features and colouring. The Mechelse Koekoek is a grey-and-white speckled chicken while the Poulet de Bresse is a white variety. The resulting Mechelse Bresse, however has turned out to be black. In London, the French-Belgian bastard was subsequently crossbred with the Redcap. This English breed is threatened with extinction due to inbreeding, but now at least some of its genetic material will survive in the crossbreeding process. Shortly, the French-Belgian-English bastard will be mated with a breed from another country. The critics of this artist should realise one thing: there is no more stopping this project.

Consequently, scientific documentation of the project also has to be kept up to date and Vanmechelen is constantly exchanging ideas with specialists from the world of medicine and science. His many years of friendship and collaboration with Prof. Dr. Willem Ombelet, head of the Genk Institute for Fertility Technology, culminated in his design for seven medical rooms and corridors from the hospital’s fertilisation ward, creating the varied installation Born. In 2000, Koen Vanmechelen launched his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, which documents the crucial role of the chicken in his work. The artist started crossing breeds of chicken from different countries – currently the eighth generation is alive. This creative intervention not only occurs in nature and in Vanmechelen’s chicken coops and cages, but also finds its parallel in acts of artistic creation when he ‘crosses’ chicken specimens with other animals, like eagles, or even with artificial materials like glass. In his exhibition designs for museums and galleries, he takes this further by attempting to build his own cages around his artworks and by often juxtaposing his own works with living chickens. Vanmechelen’s clearly outlined artistic field of discussion is conveyed through a wide range of media and artistic techniques. Video, photography, and installations feature as well as paintings and drawings, in which he again uses different materials and techniques – ranging from collage to light. A central role is held by his sculptural work. In this he works a lot with glass because he is particularly fascinated by its mysterious and enigmatic qualities as well as the uncanny power and significance which glass possesses in his eyes. The exhibition The Accident shows a representative selection of works from all these groups. Through the presentation by Berengo Contemporary at Art Basel Miami Beach, Vanmechelen’s complex artistic statement has the chance to receive broad attention, and it provides the opportunity to present to a wide audience the continuity of his artistic discourse and the absolute uniqueness of his œuvre.

English translation by Catherine Thys

2007 Peter Dupont Coincidence or not. Is everything predestined? 2006 Agnes Husslein Koen Vanmechelen “The Accident” ‘The chicken is a metaphor for human existence and the egg is a metaphor for the world and the laboratory of the future.’ Koen Vanmechelen Koen Vanmechelen, who was born in 1965 in Sint-Truiden (Belgium), has been working single-mindedly for many years on his project – the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. In this, art and science merge. His impressive artistic analysis tackles, in an innovative way, fundamental questions about humanity – What is life? What is our identity as a species and as an individual? As an observer, researcher, and artist, he knows how to intelligently question his subject, analyse it, and always expand on it, presenting it in a new light. His work is a project ‘in progress’ in response to these fundamental human questions. The egg – synonym for life – is a perfect metaphor, but also a tool with which to develop his artistic/scientific work. On the one hand it represents fertility, the beginning, but on the other it also signifies a confined but formally ideal space, a wonderful cage that will break open. A cage out of which something new will be created and nobody knows exactly what. In the ongoing cycle of fertilising and being fertilised, liberating and being domesticated, the egg at the beginning is the ultimate cage. The classic question springs to mind about which came first, the chicken or the egg? It is only in the link between the disciplines of art and science that Vanmechelen sees a possibility for progress, a chance to gain answers. What are his concerns? With his projects he illustrates on a scientific basis – in a critical, original and varied way – crucial ethical issues of our society related to globalisation, racism, cloning, and genetic manipulation.

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The American palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, called humankind ‘a glorious accident.’ More than ever scientists, theologians, writers, and philosophers, but also filmmakers, historians, and artists study the nature of coincidence as can be seen in the series Lost, the film Babel, the book Mobius Dick and the exposition The Accident. A quote by Stephen Jay Gould to start with; ‘nature is one big violent amoral contraption, cruel, wasteful and indifferent to suffering and man is an unintentional, bizarre, and glorious by-product. Evolution serves no purpose; it leads to change, not necessarily to improvement. The idea that man is an elevated end product of our evolution is a perversity.’ In other words, human existence is purely a coincidence according to the American palaeontologist. Coincidence is a creature that Homo sapiens has been trying to tame for thousands of years. Oracles, visionaries, alchemists, shamans, cabbalists and prophets have all tried to catch the unexpected by making the invisible, visible. With the disappearance of tribal cultures, only remnants of the ancient customs remain; the Dogon - a tribe of around 100,000 people in West-Africa – still read the footmarks of the desert fox; the shamans of the Makuna Indians in the South-West of Columbia still rely on coca, yage, and other ‘spiritual food’ to become jaguars, just like their ancestors did. It took a long time before the question of coincidence was put through a thorough test. For a long time, the idea that coincidence does not exist - all events are, in other words, previously defined and predictable - had most followers, in philosophy as well as in physics. In theology, two different opinions have clashed for centuries: God has predestined everything versus God gave human beings a free will. In the past hundred years, a number of influential people steered ideas about coincidence in a certain direction. Since the event of the internet, they have influenced the ‘man in the street’ as never before. They fight for the truth on forums, blogs, I-magazines, and other virtual information carriers. We shall list them here. 233

Memories The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung writes in his Memories about a dream in which an old man with the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull flies through the air. In the period that he paints this curious dream, he finds a kingfisher in his garden, a species that is highly unusual in Switzerland. After that, he starts to notice that sometimes a succession of ‘coincidental’ events happen, which sometimes seem to have a kind of hidden relationship. He calls this phenomenon ‘synchronism’ and is the first person to bring this to the attention of the public. These meaningful coincidences make connections with the ‘collective subconscious’, an epigenetic inherited part of the subconscious: a mental area that is shared by all representatives of a race or species, according to Jung. Different In 1956, the book Metabletica of leer der veranderingen (The changing nature of man) was published. The Dutch psychiatrist and scientific philosopher, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, contends in this book that humans change over the course of time. For this reason, our lives are not ‘a variation on a well-known theme’ (i.e. the lives that people used to live in the past), but ‘different, substantially different’. According to van den Berg, coincidence is directed by the laws of metabletics, which is another word for synchronicity. Seemingly unconnected events may show a mutual connection in time and space. Van den Berg looks into the significance and meaning of the changes that have taken place. Strangely these changes became visible in various fields at the same time: among others, mathematics, architecture, spirituality, physics, psychology, religion, the relation between people, and the history of art. An example: psychoanalysis and the subconscious are not just scientific discoveries but show that the subconscious developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth century into an anti-ego. According to van den Berg, this anti-ego developed because of the French Revolution that emphasized the equality of people. By claiming something that goes so much against the reality of inequality between people, people become strangers to themselves because they have to deny something they know to be true. This development can be found in historical facts such as the German Doppelgänger literature from the nineteenth century, in the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in the same period as Sigmund Freud and Josef Breur’s first work, etc. The simultaneous occurrence of changes in various disciplines suggests a change that is essential for a certain period and ensures that new insights are ‘in the air’. According to van den Berg geniuses are the first ones to notice these changed times in the structure of matter that has changed. Although the human guides of such changes are often schooled in different disciplines, sensing these changes demands a pre-scientific mentality of the scientist that rises above these disciplines. It is necessary to see things intuitively and to have a wider spiritual view. Quantum mechanics Van den Berg’s metabletica is radically opposed to the quantum mechanics (among others, Max Planck and Niels Bohr) that replaced classic mechanics in 1925. Quantum mechanics argue that a particle (i.e. a photon or an electron) behaves, depending on observation, as a wave or as a classic particle. The particle ‘chooses’ one of the two possibilities at the moment it is observed. An observation at this level is always influenced by the observer itself. From this, many opponents of determinism deduce that it is impossible for the observer to make a complete prognosis and that the completely predictable universe (according to modern physics) does not exist for human beings. In 2005, in the scientific journal Nature, the Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger wrote that ‘the discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the twentieth century.’ Zeilinger became famous after he succeeded, together with his team, to teleport a single light particle a couple of meters in a period of zero seconds. Zeilinger believes that quantum mechanics show that an intrinsic coincidence governs nature and that the concept of reality should be rethought, and that we should perhaps think more subjectively. Cosmos The concept of synchronicity has penetrated the bastion of positive sciences. ‘Everything is nestled in something’ is how the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake explains his vision of the cosmos. ‘Life encompasses more than biologists study at this moment. An organism is more than the chemicals in its body.’ With his book New science of Life (1980), he started a major offensive against orthodox science and it’s ‘high priests’. Sheldrake immediately put the entire 234

scientific world upside down with his hypothesis of ‘morphic resonance’. His thesis that all living beings are as they are - plugged into the collective, universal memory of the species eroded the fundaments of the mechanistic scientific Newtonian view. Telepathy is often the description that is used for being plugged in, but Sheldrake sees it more as an animal form of communication. This develops through an invisible, ‘morphic’ field. From Sheldrake’s hypothesis follows that everlasting laws of nature do not exist and that nature is a living organism. Many see Sheldrake as a New Age guru, others as a genius. Sheldrake’s experiments with morphogenic fields have given powerful munition to opponents of the strict scientific view of life and being, amongst them the followers of the intelligent Design hypothesis and a colourful band of spiritual seekers. The step from the fact whether or not coincidence exists, to a god figure, is then apparently quickly set. One of the people to do this, is the Indian writer Deepak Chopra, who strung the ideas of Sheldrake and Jung together with elements from Ayurveda and quantum mechanics, and made a twenty-first century rosary. Coincidence exists according to Chopra, but coincidences are strung together in our universe. Enough eager people are waiting to latch onto this, as is apparent from the fact that Chopra was acclaimed one of the most influential people of the century by Time magazine in 1999. Chopra’s emphatic outings into the world of positive sciences, have led to powerful reactions of sceptics and scientists in past years. The American Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, calls it ‘Chicken soup for the New Age’. Significant In his book Why people believe weird things, Shermer says: ‘In the paranormal world, coincidences are often seen as deeply significant. ‘Synchronicity’ is invoked, as if some mysterious force were at work behind the scenes. However, I see synchronicity as nothing more than a type of contingency - a conjuncture of two or more events without apparent design. When the connection is made in a manner that seems impossible according to our intuition of the laws of probability, we have a tendency to think something mysterious is at work.’ ‘However, most people have a very poor understanding of the laws of probability. A gambler will win six in a row and then think he is either “on a hot streak” or “due to lose.” Two people in a room of thirty people discover that they have the same birthday and conclude that something mysterious is at work. You go to the phone to call your friend Bob. The phone rings and it is Bob. You think, ‘Wow, what are the chances; this could not have been a mere coincidence. Maybe Bob and I are communicating telepathically.’ In fact, none of these coincidences are coincidences under the rules of probability. The gambler has predicted both possible outcomes, a fairly safe bet! The probability that two people in a room of thirty people will have the same birthday is 71 percent. And you have forgotten how many times Bob did not call under such circumstances or someone else called, or Bob called but you were not thinking of him, and so on. As the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional pay-off to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.’ And the moral is: ‘That a particular specified event or coincidence will occur is very unlikely,’ according to the American psychologist David G. Myers in his book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. ‘That some astonishing unspecified events will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight. And that is why even those of us who believe in God don’t need God’s special intervention, or psychic powers, to expect, yet also delight in, improbable happenings.’

2007 Edith Doove THE ACCIDENT Koen Vanmechelen At the core of the work of Koen Vanmechelen (Sint-Truiden, Belgium, 1965) stands his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project in which he crossbreeds chickens from all over the world. This began with the Belgian Mechelse Koekoek that was crossbred with the French Poulet de Bresse, 235

resulting in the Mechelse Bresse. In the meantime, already eight generations of Cosmopolitan Chickens have been crossbred. For Vanmechelen this crossbreeding of chickens is a way to deal with a whole series of ethical, philosophical, scientific, social critical and political questions. Globalisation, racism, cloning, and genetic manipulation are just some examples of the issues. The attention for the other, across borders of any kind, is a universal and important theme. This gets a magnificent artistic approach through The Cosmopolitan Chicken by Vanmechelen asks by way of the chicken. As Agnes Husslein puts it, through the chickens, Vanmechelen asks fundamental questions about men. What is life? What is our identity as a species and as an individual? The egg, synonym for life, is a perfect metaphor. Husslein states, on the one hand, it represents fertility, the beginning. On the other hand it is also a closed, formally ideal space, a wonderful cage that will break open, and out of which something new will be created and nobody knows exactly what. Koen Vanmechelen is not a glass artist in the classical sense of the word. His interest in glass comes forth from The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. The transparency and fragility of this material add to the essence of his investigation of the hybrid. In general, Vanmechelen uses clear glass, as is also the case in the works that are brought together in ‘The Accident’. Clear glass symbolises the purity that he is after in his work. Even crossing and mixing the chickens after all, needs to be done from an honest point of view. And just like the chicken, glass is above all a living material with a memory, composed from the four primary elements: water, earth, fire and air. The forms that Koen Vanmechelen makes in glass can differ extensively. It once started with The Walking Egg – a simple oval shape to which two metal chicken legs were attached. The work has both a comical and a symbolical value. The transparent egg walks away with the truth, it is too quick for us and always full of surprises. Especially when shown in an installation with several samples, it shows the dynamics of the project. Vanmechelen does not necessarily look for complicated forms in his glass work – simplicity often says more. The ‘simple’ egg shape therefore regularly comes back, with or without the legs. Semi-abstract chicken heads can however also be alternated with very true-to-nature specimen as the glass half of The Accident shows. And also the elegant urns of Forever, that hold the ashes and cleaned bones of chickens that were used for the sculpture Salvator Globe, show a completely different design. The glass and its shape are thus completely placed at the service of the message that Vanmechelen wants to spread with his covering Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. Forever came forth as an answer to the invitation to make an installation in a former chapel. The ashes and bones in the urns point to cremation and the age old idea of ‘ashes to ashes’, the full life cycle in which mass becomes energy and can generate mass again. Besides this there is a strong similarity with the process of making glass objects for which glass is brought to a temperature of up to 1200°C. This absurd high temperature leads to near destruction but at the same time to creation and new life. It is the fire inside that creates and gives new energy. As always in the work of Koen Vanmechelen Forever also contains a layering of meanings. Preserving the ashes of his chickens in precious urns as if they are relics, gives his animals a personal treatment that is in shrill contrast with the mass destruction and often burning of chickens to destroy them because of the chicken flue or other diseases. But the placing of this installation in a former chapel also suggests a playful interaction with the idea of life, death and resurrection. Thus the chicken again becomes an allegory for men. The Accident brings together a series of works that specifically examine the crossing between chicken and glass, but also play with the wonderful architecture of The Glass House. Through this it definitely is an exhibition that shows very diverging aspects that reach much further than glass alone, but for which glass is certainly an important metaphor. Amazement, curiosity, and respect are the most important guidelines for Koen Vanmechelen when realising his work. No doubt they will also strike the visitors of his exhibition.

2008 Frank van de Schoor Bastard with airs of grandeur The double portrait of the Mechelse Koekoek and the Poulet de Bresse is reminiscent of the diptych portraying Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his consort Battista Sforza, by Piero della Francesca in 1456 (collection Uffizi museum, Florence). In both cases prominent creatures are depicted in profile and adorned with the most beautiful plumage. We are dealing here with the vain interplay of observing and being observed. The Montefeltros were a noble family from the fortified Italian city of Urbino and the Sforzas came from the city-state of Milan. The Mechelse Koekoek is the Flemish lion of Belgian chickens while the Poulet de Bresse represents the French appellation controllée. Humanity has created its coveted chicken race to mirror its own identity. Each nation has created its own particular race of chicken. Whether it is a display chicken, a breeding chicken, a consumption chicken or a fighting chicken, its external characteristics conform to each country’s ideal. In this way the chicken becomes a symbol of national culture. The Poulet de Bresse, the undisputed culinary champion in the French kitchen, makes up the colours of the French flag with its red crown, white feathers and blue feet. The chickens portrayed by Koen Vanmechelen for The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project are all depicted in profile. The composition is balanced, while the crowns, eyes, and feathers are beautifully emphasised. Such portraits radiate with eminence. The grooved heads seem inaccessible. The side profile is a tried and tested stylistic method, of which Roman emperors were already glad to make use. The heads of rulers are engraved on coins for eternity. Christian saints are also depicted in profile, while their halos are depicted from the front. A silhouette image in art can also provoke a certain amount of alienation, as is the case with the men in bowler hats in the paintings by René Magritte or with the birdlike nudes in the work of Paul Delvaux. For a painter like Jan Toorop, the fashionable looking Mechelse Redcap would have been a grateful model for one of his society portraits. In depicting his project chickens, Koen Vanmechelen succeeds in rendering them a status that delivers an original contribution to the iconography of portrait art. The eyes of subjects depicted in profile often have a sunken expression. In this position there is no eye contact between the model and the painter or photographer and therefore no direct relationship between artist and sitter. The depiction invites careful observation. It is thus no coincidence that the method is also used for scientific illustrations of horses and birds. In this respect it is important to note that a chicken’s range of vision is different. Because their eyes are on the side, they can only view us in profile. Depicting the Cosmopolitan Chicken using a variety of techniques, expressional forms and materials is the theme that runs through Koen Vanmechelen’s work. With great precision he records all phases in the development of his breeding project. Each new generation is represented in striking collages, constructions, glass objects, drawings, videos, computer animations and colour photos. His impressive knowledge of the breeding process and the fascinating metamorphosis that takes place each time races are crossed, allows him to get ever closer to the essence of the chicken. He places each animal on a pedestal and transforms the magnificent chicken into an icon, which sometimes even acquires human characteristics. In terms of art, he manages to render the chicken a Marilyn Monroe-like star status. Ironically enough, the glamour of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is bestowed on bastard chickens. For Koen Vanmechelen, crossing symbolic races of chickens is first and foremost an artistic project. It can even be characterised as pioneering. Belgian gallery owner and art historian Jo Coucke once described the project as ‘a positive and developmentally oriented act, resulting from extreme liberal thinking’. Koen Vanmechelen’s strength indeed lies in his independent thinking. The artist is not hindered by codes or conventions and his inspired concepts do not get caught in an artificial vacuum either, as he is far too down to earth. He speaks and philosophises uninhibitedly about the chicken as a metaphor for life (or energy) and about the egg as a metaphor for the world (or mass). His intuitive line of thought invites one to think along and reflect on the reverse side of the visible world. Koen Vanmechelen sees it as the task of every artist to make visible what is seemingly invisible. Against this background, his statement ‘it is fantasy that creates reality’ is a paradigm that concisely expresses how art is rooted in everyday life. With his imagination he actively focuses on the ordinary, what is at hand, what we feel comfortable with. So close that we sometimes do not even notice it. What could be more trivial

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than the chicken? Birds that have been domesticated and kept close to humans all over the world. Not as a pet, as they are not cuddly creatures, but as a sign of social and domestic life. Koen Vanmechelen considers the chicken one of humankind’s most faithful allies. He characterises the animal as: ‘a small meat and egg factory on two legs that accompanies humans. It has wings but still remains with us’. In many countries across the world one encounters chickens walking about freely. In the Netherlands, we are at a loss with chickens that have gone wild. The usually discarded animals live on the edge of residential areas, in small parks or thickets. They often show themselves, as they have nothing to fear from humans. They prefer to scratch around in their own neighbourhood. In other countries such chickens are sometimes caught and eaten with relish. This does not occur in the Netherlands, where residents do not have such plans for free-roaming chickens. Is the free chicken something strange? Does it show respect for nature? It could be described as a holy chicken, just as India has its holy cow. Making use of the chicken’s underdog position, Koen Vanmechelen manages to constantly surprise the worlds of art and science. The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is situated within the boundaries of art. It is a creatively positioned course that has been well thought out conceptually. The results of the breeding project are spectacular. With his enthusiasm the artist has even managed to convince the sceptics. He wastes no opportunity to explain his plan and to place his ideas in a broader context. With the experience of art as the starting point, he has developed appealing metaphors with the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, which address social issues such as multiculturalism, the race issue and globalisation. He brings this often emotionally charged debate to a humanistic level, where issues such as freedom, dignity and development are at the forefront. Koen Vanmechelen manifests himself primarily in the art world, but also searches for allies amongst scientists working on fertility research, biotechnology, and the philosophy of science. He baffles bio-geneticists by giving infertile chicken races an active evolutionary role again. As a matter of fact, there is also a philosophical dimension to the chicken, the star of the ‘chicken or egg’ debate. The reproductive system of the chicken remains a fascinating subject. The eggshell protects the unborn chick, but it can just as easily cause its death if the chick is not energetic enough to break through the shell at the right time. The eye of a chicken observes us and has an intriguing expression. It is possible to lose yourself in the comic chicken eye, which is conjured up for us by the artist. As an artist Koen Vanmechelen allows himself to be led by creative impulses, which, by his own account, come from his dreams and daily activities. With the productive alliance of fantasy and reality he constructs his utopian breeding project - in many ways an inspiration.

2008 Mike Phillips Art, Science, and the emergence of the Cosmopolitan Chicken By tradition artists play with every idea you can imagine. For instance, an outline of the development of European artistic techniques, may also serve as a map of how Western European art history reflects a network of ideas based on scientific experimentation and observation - scale, perspective, mathematical computations, anatomical discoveries, the effects of light and the chemical or physical analyses of substances all furnish Western art with a dynamic mobility. Science has also been a complex partner in the development of new ways of understanding the world, and Western artists have engaged in all the historical currents set off and completed by notable scientific discoveries, for example, the various phases of the Enlightenment, modernity and post-modernity. From this perspective, it seems self-evident that art and science are essentially linked in the enterprise of discovering new knowledge. On the other hand, the distance between the two

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disciplines has grown to an extent which might have been unimaginable even at the beginning of the twentieth century. 19th century Romanticism was a crucial landmark. In the Romantic Canon the artist became a figure who was a link to another world, spiritual and immanent, a transmitter of messages from a dimension completely separate from the earthbound manipulations of physical science. The period isolated artists within the boundaries of aesthetics, emotion, and fantasy. The onset of 20th century modernity introduced another perspective. Artists were no longer messengers of the divine, focusing instead on an aesthetic inspired by materials, shapes, and textures. A picture can be about nothing except itself, as Van Doesberg remarked. Duchamp initiated a new relationship with objects, and Picasso’s retort to the question ‘What is art?’ was ‘What is not?’ Oddly enough, in the splurge of ideas associated with modernity, the distance between art and science hardly narrowed during most of the century. The psychodrama of Romantic belief, Frankenstein, had sketched out the scientific mind as driven by a confused desire to tinker with nature and humanity, and little happened for a century and a half to change that popular view. Scientists released the power of the atom to a great and destructive effect. Pure science spoke in a jargon which had little purchase beyond the scientific community. If anything the refinements of scientific and research methods reinforced the barriers between the two different approaches. Until, that is, the tectonic plates shifted. Up to midway through the 20th century the only framework for creating an intersection between art and science was the field of politics. Art and science could meet in the difficult terrain of the social world, usually on opposite sides of a fence which obscured purposes and outcomes, in an arena where they joined as competitors or deadly rivals in a struggle about the meaning of life. From halfway through the 20th century, however, both sides of the divide began a struggle with new and different issues. The advance of technology created new conditions in the sciences. Scientific discoveries had always been an act of imagination. From the perspective of a young child, both enterprises have their origins in an accessible act of creativity and imagination. The divisions arrive pre-packaged within the methodology associated with the two approaches. On the other hand, new technology had begun to alter the limitations of technique, with a computer in front of him, every lab rat could dream of being his own Einstein. And such dreams. The exploration of space, the mapping of the earth’s elements and history, and the constituents of life itself; DNA. Science was entering the world of the fabulous and the infinite at the very moment when art seemed to have abandoned such dreams. At the same time art itself had begun migrating to new arenas. In the final decades of the 20th century technology burst the boundaries which contained the artwork. Video and video art demolished one wall of the cube which had, during the previous two centuries, shut artists in. In the new environment museums and galleries even began to mimic the accessibility of open public spaces. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, for instance, delivers itself to the visitor as a continuation of the public thoroughfare along the river. In a similar way sculpture parks and monumental outdoor works have begun to proliferate. Conceptual art completed the challenge to traditional constructions of artistic meaning. The detritus of everyday life, animate, and inanimate objects began to invade the space outlined within the canon of aesthetic sensibilities, which had been reinforced and confined in the framework of skills, such as draughtsmanship. Meaning now trumped technique, and if the conjunction of the artists gaze and the public’s attention could transform the most mundane object within the area of the gallery, it was only a matter of time before this transformation would apply outside the walls, in the real world. The cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 created a new focus in the public perception of science and its interests. She was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Significantly, when she died six years later her stuffed remains went on display at Edinburgh’s Royal Museum. Up to that time, the context in which most of the public saw the achievements of experimental science was to do with the splitting of the atom and the recondite obscurities of nuclear and space technology. Dolly was the signal for a new era of interest, the field of genetics, and a focus on the meaning of life, backed up by a concentration on the ethical and moral dimensions of the practical consequences for animal (both human and non-human) identity. 239

This was precisely the sandpit in which artists had been bred to play. This was the context in which Koen Vanmechelen, in roughly the year of Dolly’s birth, began the project which underpins and frames his work as an artist, and the context is important, largely because Vanmechelen’s work constitutes, in itself, a new arena within which art and science encounter each other on terms which have been created by the new developments in each discipline. The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project began as an act of species conservation, an act in which scientific curiosity and artistic transformation were neatly bundled together. The Project took its original inspiration from Vanmechelen’s near obsessive interest in the chicken, its life cycle, its history as a species, and its genetic identity, an interest which began in childhood, when Vanmechelen kept pet chickens in his garden. The motivation sprang from Vanmechelen’s preliminary observations of the chickens which habitually turned up on the menus and tables of the Belgians. This was a hybrid with characteristics which made it suitable for consumption, and which appeared to have little or nothing in common with the traditional breeds of Belgian chickens. From this point began Vanmechelen’s search to rediscover a traditional Belgian breed, the Mechelse Koekoek. The issue was one of transformation, the reclamation of a familiar (and animate) object. In Vanmechelen’s conception human beings had conclusively and brutally intervened in the natural life cycle of the animal, creating and preserving a process by which the history an entire species had been converted into a machine for servicing a specific human desire. Confronting this history by restoring the chicken’s ability to procreate and reproduce, at random and for its own purposes, was, in itself an act of transformation which provoked intense reflections on human and animal relationships with the physical world and on the meaning of life. From this point Vanmechelen’s process developed by a method which married experiment with the ability to create new objects fed by the inspiration of the project. The identification of the Mechelse Koekoek was the beginning of an experiment in the random selection of genetic attributes. It was undeniable that hybridisation was, in effect, the natural outcome of reproductive choices, but our need to recreate the chicken as a product had given us a species whose features and characteristics could exist only within a specific and narrowly defined genetic range. Vanmechelen’s experiments asked the question; ‘what sort of animal would emerge from a random process of reproduction between original breeds?’ Pursuing the search for native breeds Vanmechelen travelled between all the continents, locating and bringing back the typical chicken from all the countries he visited. The result has been a rich and variegated program in which a new process of hybridisation took place. Early on, however, the architecture of the program was determined by the interaction of the different breeds, which Vanmechelen calls crossings. That is to say, each encounter between two original types represents a crossing between different bundles of genetic material. The results are unpredictable, but the supposition must be that the entire process constitutes a sort of warehouse of genes to which each crossing contributes. One consequence of the process is the interest of several scientists and geneticists in investigating the effects of Vanmechelen’s crossings on the chicken’s genetic structure, but in the artist’s scheme the progression moves towards the birth of a fabulous creature, whose genetic makeup will contain the entire history of this avian species; the Cosmopolitan Chicken. Vanmechelen’s own production springs inevitably out of this process, the different stages feeding and inspiring the imageries which define his artwork. The perceptions of the program offered a number of concepts which recur throughout the work. For instance, 1) The motif of the body as a cage 2) The process of birth as an escape from the boundaries of the cage 3) The evolution of a spiritual identity Vanmechelen’s paintings and sculptures draw on these notions to establish a long term dialogue grouped around the meaning of the chicken’s genetic progress towards an unimaginable future. ‘Just let’s look at some of his paintings: a highly expressive painting of a ‘chickenoid’ creature but interspersed (placed at intervals among other things) over the painting, we find larger or smaller chunks of eggshell, as if this creature has emerged directly from the egg, not 240

in the form of a chicken of flesh and blood, but immediately in the form of a painting, highly expressive and seductive, the remnants and witnesses of his origin still present on top of the canvas surface’. (Luc Vrielinck) The argument constitutes a sort of dream about the representation of the biology which determines the architecture of animal existence, that is to say, an extended meditation about role and meaning of life. In this sense, the Project represents an artwork whose origins and contours are not determined by the techniques and technicalities of artistic representation. Instead, the Cosmopolitan Chicken aims to be a production of the organic rhythms of nature’s own reproductive systems and purposes. Vanmechelen’s own artwork represents different stages of this never ending process, a staircase on its way to the indefinable, a unique mix of different media and materials from highly expressive paintings and drawings, to photography, video, installations, works in glass, and a recurring wooden sculpture. What connects all these is the work’s vital origins in the genetic program, his symbolic use of avian life, and an emerging attempt to outline the spiritual dimensions of the biological process. In a sense, Vanmechelen’s work restores and makes explicit the linkages between the physical world, the world of signs and symbols, and the abstract universe hinted at in our yearnings for a spiritual identity. Within this practice the divisions between different disciplines melt away, art and science become one, and the work delivers us to a confrontation with the visions of the world a child might see.

2009 Susan M. Squier The Art and Science of Monstrosity Koen Vanmechelen has issued a call for biological variety as a metaphor for human society. As he explains, his long-term art project, The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project has grown into a society next to a society, which makes us think in a metaphorical way about our own culture and nature. In other words: “If all is well with the chicken, all is well with us”, says the artist. Vanmechelen’s artistic vision of a society whose development is engineered by interventions into chicken breeding, and which articulates the complex relations between nature and culture has a precedent in a work by zoologist Julian Huxley in the early twentieth century. We know Huxley as the architect behind the modern evolutionary synthesis, but he was also the author of a science fiction short story, The Tissue-Culture King (1926), exploring themes that would later take a central place in Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken Project: the infinite variety of forms available in nature, the generative position of monsters in science and society, the spiritual or religious dimensions of reproduction, and the powerful if invisible connections between science and the state. While Huxley’s story offers a critique of the drive for control and power underlying modern medicine, it also suggests some of the originality and emancipatory vision of Vanmechelen’s notion of the world of difference springing from, and articulated through, his chicken breeding project. In The Tissue-Culture King, Huxley tells the story of a British researcher kidnapped by an African tribe. In order to save his life, Dr. Hascombe promises the tribesmen that he can ‘render visible the blood’s hidden nature and reality’ and thus safeguard the life of their king. Renowned for his research on tissue culture, cancer, and developmental physiology, Hascombe pulls together all his scientific knowledge and develops a technique for rendering the king—or more precisely his tissues—immortal. ‘Our aim was to multiply the King’s tissues indefinitely, to ensure that some of their protecting power should reside everywhere in the country.’ Working with ‘quite good cultures, first of chick tissues and later, by the aid of embryo-extract, of various adult mammalian tissues,’ he removes ‘small portions of His Majesty’s subcutaneous connective tissue under a local anaesthetic, ... puts fragments of this into a culture medium, and once they have shown abundant growth’, distributes small amounts of them to tribal citizens throughout the country, until ‘there was hardly a family in the country which did not possess at least one sacred culture.’ Having demonstrated his value to the state, Hascombe 241

becomes religious adviser to His Majesty King Mgobe, and begins to create a strange mirror image of Western medicine in this African nation by founding the Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the Wellspring of Ancestral Immortality or, as he describes it the Institute of Religious Tissue Culture. Distortion Hascombe’s Institute recalls its Western medical siblings but always with a distortion. It is well funded through the tithing of livestock which is required of each citizen obtaining a culture of the king’s tissues; it trains its own laboratory technicians--tribal women, who ultimately take on the permanent status of Sisters of the Sacred Tissue; it offers a program of regenerative medicine through culturing the tissues of aged citizens before they die so that the customary ancestor worship can be carried out with living ancestral remains; and it maintains a vast tissue bank though it serves not pathology but emergent biology, for it is ‘not a necropolis, but a histopolis ... not a cemetery, but a place of eternal growth.’ Despite its structural similarities to Western medical institutions, Hascombe’s Institute is also a dramatic departure in the application of its research. The endocrinology laboratory specializes in the creation of deliberate monstrosities. Another laboratory attempts to extend parthenogenesis from avian and reptilian eggs to mammalian ones. Deciding he would ‘see whether art could not improve upon nature’ Hascombe there applies his knowledge of experimental embryology to the production of grotesque animals such as ‘double-headed and cyclopean monsters ... three-headed snakes, and toads with an extra heaven-pointing head.’ Purpose What is Hascombe’s purpose in creating these ‘incredible animal monstrosities’? The question Huxley’s short story raised to readers of The Yale Review in 1926 has recently taken on interest to artists and scholars alike. Hascombe’s work is an extension in fiction of a tradition of teratological and teratogenic research that according to a recent article in the BMJ Medical Humanities can be traced from the 19th century to our contemporary work with embryonic stem cells. Early 19th-century embryologists Etienne Geoffroy de Saint- Hilaire and his son Isidore tried to ‘reproduce monsters through the manipulation of fertilised chicken eggs.’ With the publication of his Recherches sur la Production Artificielle des Monstruosites ou, Essais de Teratogenie Experimentale, embryologist Camille Dareste founded the field of teratogeny—a field he hoped would be ‘a science of all possible bodies,’ which would reveal an ‘unlimited variability’ of forms. Unlike the Saint-Hilaires, who hoped to catalogue the vast variety of different shapes and structures possible in embryological life, Dareste viewed monstrosity not as pathological but as profoundly creative, seeing it as ‘an expanding horizon of variability, an open ended exploration of the possibilities of life, in which the experimental science of teratogeny participates.’ He carried out a series of experiments on chick embryos, exposing them to conditions that would produce mutations, in order to achieve ’some transformisme experimental of breeds or even species.’ Production Later biologists followed in this tradition of the deliberate production of monsters. Swiss physiologists Hermann Fol and Stanislas Warynski used a thermometer to destroy the rudimentary head of a chick embryo aged between 24 and 48 hours, in order to see how such an abnormal embryo would develop, in comparison to a normal one. They were able to create, at will, embryos missing most of their brain, or with duplicate hearts. Then in the early 1930s, British embryologist C.H. Waddington extended this research by carrying out a series of specific surgeries on chick embryos, severing, grafting, excising or stirring tissues so as to produce predictable, and meaningful abnormalities. His results enabled him to theorize a central property of embryonic growth: that development occurred through an interaction between cells and their surroundings, consisting of chemical signalling. As he explained in his classic publication, The Epigenetics of Birds, the origin of morphogenetic forces can only be sought in places where there is contact between different elements. In multi-cellular embryos such as the chick, we must therefore seek them in interactions between cell-masses (tissues), and between such cell-masses and non-cellular media.’ In other words, the scientific understanding of development is to be found by looking at how tissues interact with their surroundings at the level of the cell.

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Waddington carried out his research by using the very same technique of tissue-culturing chick embryos that was central to Hascombe’s Institute of Religious Tissue-Culture. Working at Britain’s Strangeways Research Laboratory, he investigated normal and abnormal growth, working with both embryos and cancer cells because both shared a cellular propensity for uncontrolled growth. Indeed, he too was working in the tradition of the teratologists Saint-Hilaires, who not only worked on chick embryos but also explored, in particular a kind of ovarian tumour known as a teratoma. Even Hascombe’s seemingly outrageous scientific practices-creating monstrous beings and eternal tissue-cultures to consolidate and disseminate the presence of the King throughout his African nation—have a connection to contemporary biomedical research. Pluripotent embryonic stem cells, which are central to the work in regenerative medicine, were initially confused with the cells of embryonal carcinomas. Those stem cell therapies have become potent sources of hope for extending life and curing devastating neurological diseases. Surgeons are working with trans-species organ grafts, while pharmacological researchers are using interspecies hybrids in the production of human medicines. All of these efforts reflect on a notion of monstrous development not as pathological but as promising. Huxley’s vision of a society in which a state-sponsored production of monstrous beings is represented to the populace as essential for personal longevity and state security may not at first seem to have applications for our era. But when we appreciate its relationship to the teratological, endocrinological, and embryological research that has laid the foundation for contemporary regenerative medicine, we realize that his story anticipated the profound shift that has taken place in our conception of health and medicine. As Cooper explains, ‘For the science of regenerative medicine ... health has become excessive rather than homeostatic ... the deregulated growth of the monstrosity, that ultimate countervalue to normative theories of organic life, comes to represent the most extreme potentiality of life itself.’ The very speed and variety of development makes monstrous growth now a profoundly open signifier. To quote Huxley’s Dr. Hascombe, ‘it is all growing so fast—I can see every kind of possibility ahead.’ Critique In its distorted mirroring of biomedicine in the 20th century, as in its uncannily accurate anticipation of the medicine of our day, Huxley’s little story offers a critique of the drive for control and power he saw as central to its practices. Despite its obvious fascination with the endless possibilities raised by tissue-culture and experimental embryology, Huxley’s short story is unambiguous in its condemnation of Hascombe’s science. When the explorer-narrator escapes Africa, he leaves Dr. Hascombe behind. Nor does he carry news of his scientific achievements back to Britain. ‘Although I was interested enough in his past achievements, I did not feel willing to sacrifice my future to his perverted intellectual ambitions.’ The tale concludes with a question whose social and ethical challenge rings out clearly even today: ‘The question I want to raise is this: Dr. Hascombe attained to an unsurpassed power in a number of the applications of science—but to what end did all this power serve?’

2011 Peter Noever Rebellion in the Henhouse Thoughts on Koen Vanmechelen’s artistic and culture-theoretical context. For the duration of Guangzhou’s 4th Triennial, the exceptional Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen has transformed the distinguished museum in Guangzhou into a vital centre of chicken breeding at which his 15th generation of Cosmopolitan Chickens is currently mating before the eyes of the art public. By way of generating a contrast to the usual pure-bred, nationally specific chicken breeds, Vanmechelen intentionally crosses hens and roosters of differing origins and nationalities. The chicks of the generations that follow are thus ‘bastards’ in a post-colonial and creative sense.

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‘I just killed a pig and a goat!’ Facebook inventor Marc Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook wall recently, elaborating his media coup with the following lapidary declaration: from now on, Zuckerberg continued ‘the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.’ It was quite happily and in one and the same house that Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel had human beings and pigs spend 100 days cohabiting during documenta X in Kassel. It was via an emergency court injunction, on the other hand, that an artist once tried to block her colleague’s exhibition of a (stuffed) giraffe. The offending project was conceptual artist Peter Friedl’s Zoo Story at documenta XII, for which Friedl had transported the giraffe in question from the Palestinian West Bank to the seemingly peaceful city of Kassel. At this year’s Art Basel fair, David Zink Yi presented the lifeless body of a giant squid (architeuthis) placed in a pitch-black puddle - a fleshy manifestation of human guilt washed up from the deepest depths of the conscience, one might surmise. For her part, Swiss artist Beatrice Stähli mounted dead German shepherds and arranged them in a three-part installation entitled Die Wiener Sängerknaben in 1995. And finally, a bronze statue of Hachiko—a famous dog of the Akita Inu breed which died in 1923—stands as a monument to unwavering loyalty and is one of Tokyo’s most popular rendez-vous spots for lovers (and now features in a movie by Lasse Halström with Richard Gere: Hachiko – a dog’s story). All of these artists view themselves as advocates, defenders, comrades, opponents or slaughterers, and are at any rate conscious of their power and powerlessness vis-à-vis these creatures which are different from—yet related to—themselves. In this, the artists stand metaphorically for the role of the human being—situated between animal and creator, victim and perpetrator. Simply put, these artists are dealing with issues of human existence. In his presentation, Koen Vanmechelen focuses on the mystical Red Junglefowl, which is assumed to be the mother-hen of all domesticated chickens. Thousands of eggs have been laid and then stamped with initials respectively designating the fifteen already-born generations of Cosmopolitan Chicken or Mechelse chicken with every single one representing a certain generation. The artist is using his project as a way to explore issues of subjective and global identity that have arisen as a consequence of genetic diversity, matters which naturally apply less to chickens than to human beings—and such matters are, in turn, matters of art. Koen Vanmechelen brings the issue of breeding closer to a broad human consciousness. He does not hand it over to competent experts such as geneticists, chicken breeders or market researchers, but rather claims for the topic of the chicken an approach that is artistic, intuitive, and perceptive. By transferring chicken breeding to the context of art and cultural theory, Vanmechelen opens the problem to socio-political and philosophical questions. As absurd and funny, ironic, and zany as his project may seem to be, the strategy behind it is just as unique and consistent. And this strategy makes all the clearer the determined tendency towards rebellion against traditional classifications shared by more and more artists who oscillate between art and architecture or between art and science. In this sense, the rebellion here spreads beyond the walls of the henhouse and takes aim at the traditional definition of art itself, which such transgressions simultaneously question and expand.

artistic, and cultural ideals in contemporary Europe. Yet the search for identity - even before the confrontation and clash with the different and thus threatening other - is the battle of the individual against himself. Because as the artist asserts, ‘I am the other’. Often generating destruction, this battle has, throughout history, become the expression of Vanmechelen’s artistic and scientific quest, the creative power supporting a utopian plan to connect the individual and the outside world, the self with others. In short, it is the transformation of an individual path into one of universal significance. For Koen Vanmechelen, the theme of identity is not a line to be held at all costs but the product of exchanges, combinations, and fusions as well as a tool for cultural understanding. In this sense, the idea of hybrid vigor1 is used metaphorically by the artist to express not only the genetic but also the social advantages that result from the hybridization of races, ideas, and cultures. The so-called genetic erosion2 – resulting from an inbreeding that, in its broadest and most abstract sense, can be represented by the cultural depression that plagues developed societies today – is being challenged artistically by the multidisciplinary and multimedia nature of Vanmechelen’s works. Like the artist’s ‘glass crossings’; here, Vanmechelen blends the characteristics of glass artefacts from various national traditions by ‘crossing’ the work of glass masters from different countries with authentic Murano glass. The result is a ‘genetic’ mix of various glassblowing traditions that creates unexpected and transgressive works. A mix of different cultures and glass breeds. At this moment; the artist realized eleven glass crossings with successively Murano, Waterford (Ireland), France, USA, Sweden, Taiwan, Japan, Lebanon, India, Iran, and Malaysia. Out of each crossing, a unique glass piece is born, carrying typical characteristics of these countries. Ultimately, all crossings become visionary installations given substance by transmedia crossings with e.g. drawings, video, books, light boxes, and photographs. The rationale behind this process is the same as the one behind the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project; Vanmechelen transforms an entirely devalued element into a Phoenix. New life arises out of destruction. He calls this ‘the middle’, the true place of art: breaking seemingly opposing extremes to create the unexpected. This is Vanmechelen’s way of reflecting on the existential questions of individual identity and life, the social and cultural condition of people that is always in motion. It is a perpetually changing composition, like Koen Vanmechelen’s art, always fighting in the artistic arena for perpetual evolution. 1

Hybrid vigor, heterosis, or outbreeding enhancement, is the improved or increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring. Heterosis is the occurrence of a superior offspring from mixing the genetic contributions of its parents (Wikipedia, 2012).

Genetic erosion is a process of wearing away the genetic resources of the biosphere (Cocks & Bennett, 1999, p. 69).

2012 Anna Luyten Dear Koen 15 October 2012, on the plane from Casablanca to Brussels Dear Koen, I have spent the past few months roaming through unsettled, Mediterranean regions. I have seen death and destruction, but I have also seen the strength of people who trust each other. It’s the latter that has left the greatest impression on me. We never form part of a larger plot. Instead, we stagger across a road that, day after day, is built and then blasted open again. A person traverses winding roads so that he need not disappear. And in his quest for a homeland, he usually stumbles over well-worn paths. I see that you are now stationed in Alden Biesen - as a modern-day knight of a different order. I see that you are waging a battle with the spirit of a militant clergy that once protected the borders of its own faith.

2012 Adriano Berengo An arena for artistic combat The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is an artistic-scientific, racial, and cultural hybridization through which Koen Vanmechelen raises questions and searches for answers to some fundamental questions of existence. The chicken and the egg, which he uses as the central subjects of his work, are the conceptual and visual devices for a complex discourse on identity that thrives on the fusion of various disciplines. In this sense, the exhibition COMBAT in Landcommandery Alden Biesen - scene and symbol of the Teutonic struggle for the Christianization of Eastern Europe - becomes the metaphysical arena for a virtual fight between personal, 244

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Transcending borders has always been your hallmark. You break open rigid and controlled environments. You force us to look at the world with a broader perspective. It’s been a long time since I first talked to you over a kitchen table. You spoke of chickens and crossings, and you gave me a lump in my throat: that stubbornness, that genius, that cheerfulness... and that will to soothe fear along the way. You have never wandered well-worn paths. I see a portrait of you now; a man covered in white feathers, like an angel unwilling to ascend. As if you crawled out of an egg. You have broken through your shell - not so much triumphant, but with the courage of the cautious, like a man with a bird’s eye view to the world who observes reality with startling and razor-sharp insight. I see your messianic beard and the mystery that you spread. I see how you have opened up the architecture of power in that ancient castle and made it into a place that is both yours and ours. You transform knowledge into the power of conjecture. The brain has its territorial instincts too. You subvert knowledge, you force it into uncomfortable surrender. This is likewise a form of destruction and rebuilding. Maybe that is your artistic gift. I know that you have travelled the world round - as a professional foreigner, as a discoverer of species. I know that you can delve deeply into that. In the castle, you have used the portraits of men, their torsos adorned with the symbols of power, as a measure of how we view ourselves. That expression as mirror, as father confessor, as executioner. It’s as if you have pulled something out of the fire, an existence that breathes behind the frontlines, up where the main battle for survival wages on. In this way, you lay bare the fragility of the self. We are only creatures made of skin and bones who now and then encounter each other briefly. Greetings, Anna

2014 WHERE IT STARTED: The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

Something very curious happens when you look inside a museum and see a large space covered by a thick dirt floor with a dozen fat white chickens walking around pecking the ground, eating and drinking, from time to time looking out the window, or finding their way down wide enclosed plastic shoot taking them into the garden where they can see a large handsome grey brown and mottled rooster in his cage, surveying the sweep of the museums’ grounds which are enclosed by eighteenth century brick building. This was the very first installation of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) in 1999 as part of a group show in the Provinciaal Museum of Hasselt, in a group show called In de Ban van de Ring curated by Annemie Van Laethem. The exhibition was varied - I was installing a series of sculptures made by Richard Deacon and Thomas Schütte as a collaboration called Them and Us in the small rooms of the Begijnhof, as well as video sculptures of Tony Oursler - it was the period where Oursler had video images of distorted faces trapped by furniture, caught in corners of suitcases unable to get out, crying desperately in an endless loop - among other artists in this exhibition were works by land artist, Peter Hutchinson, and fellow Belgians Marie-Jo Lafontaine not far from large wax sculptures of a young Berlinde de Bruyckere. The outright humour these busy chickens brought into this serious art setting was sparkling. As the opening approached, it became a sport to see how often the white chickens (who I had learned were all female, and French Poulet de Bresse) could jump onto the plastic gangplank and try to see, talk to and just generally attract the attention of the Belgian rooster (the Mechelse Koekoek). It was clear to me reading the sign in front of the roosters’ cage that this was A CROSS-BREEDING PROJECT which also made me laugh, thinking about other kinds 246

of installation work that might help me decipher what I was seeing (I of course thought about Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, (1977) in New York, and the many tiers of display cases and museum cabinets of Mark Dion’s artefacts from foraging along the banks of rivers and collecting animal specimens, and again of Joseph Beuys’ love of his political party for animals). I spent time looking carefully at this three-room installation by the unknown Belgian artist with great interest. The room with the dirt floor and chickens had a black and white film filling the far wall, just behind the seven level nesting bar for the hens at night, it showed a long haired man eating pieces of cooked chicken, looking into the camera, pulling bits off the bone and eating with relish. It amused me that the chickens were uninterested in the film. Then in the adjoining room were documentation mounted on the wall in the style of On Kawara, or Hanne Darboven, charts, graphs, head shots of chickens with what looked like passport information just below, the texts on the wall had a regularity about them that smelled like a new kind of minimalism, mixed up with the technological constructions - incubators, pens with red heat lamps, small televisions with related video works playing. In the hours before the opening, I spent time taking in the breadth of this installation, and trying to see where its origins lay, and how it was so fresh and lively, even daring. It was something familiar but I realized in its complexity that it was a complete vision of something totally new. The afternoon itself was punctuated by a momentous discourse delivered by the late Jan Hoet. It was a hot summer day, and he stood under the shadow of one very large Chestnut tree, with the audience seated around him on the grass, there were a good hundred listening to him for over an hour. Hoet was well known for this style of preaching, no one moved, and it seemed that day as if art history was being made quietly in a small town in Limburg. It felt like one of the parables in the New Testament with Jesus teaching the converted, though I didn’t understand the nuances of the Flemish conversation, later Jan Hoet made a point of saying to me, ‘You know Jill, this young Belgian is the most important artist we have since Broodthaers’. The seed of this idea had already rooted in my mind during the days I witnessed the completion of his installation. My first conversation with Koen is retold as part of the speech that I made last year in Hasselt (you can find it on Youtube or the Darwin’s Dream website), and how I brought the project a year later to London so that the offspring of this first crossing could mate with the British female Redcap is also part of this talk. The summer of 2000 the second stage of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project filled the first floor gallery of the Lisson Gallery’s building overlooking Bell Street. The exhibition was called A Shot In The Head, and the mix was referred to as the Mechelse Redcap. All the elements of the installation from Hasselt were present in a smaller space, this time the hens and the rooster were sharing their pens in the gallery, instead of dirt flooring they had sawdust, the sounds of their voices and the smell of real animals reminded everyone that nature has a very strong presence even in an art gallery. I am not sure how the gallery in New York smelled when Beuys and the Coyote cohabited together for his performance, or how it sounded the muffled or loud communication between them. The four diagrams of the future ideas for the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project filled the wall opposite the pens. It was impossible to know in the summer of 2000, that everything this young artist wanted to achieve, that he meticulously drew on these breeding charts, would eighteen generations later come to be. The noble title of this first chart is Gallus Domesticus Mechelse Cosmopolitan sounded more like something you might find in an early Latin text of Virgil, than in contemporary art. The physical differences in the birds who followed man, or had been put into burlap sacks and taken with man from the Himalayas to North America, and all the continents in between - were presented like a display chart - the way Marcel Broodthaers transposed cows into types of automobiles, for example, in Les Animaux de la ferme, 1974. What is so striking here is the resemblances, how like the human populations of one part of the world or another these chickens looked. The Chinese Silky has feathers that look like threads of silk, the French hen is the colour of the French flag, the Jersey Giant is as mighty as the state of New Jersey, and so on. And as I repeat to everyone, this is not about chickens, it is about all of us and the crazy society we make in our diverse ways. The world has moved hard and fast since the birth of the CCP project. There are for the last few years, international groups of scientists working parallel to his art work, because in this intuitive questioning of things Vanmechelen has come from the sides in a lateral form of address to the heart of some of the very large and very difficult issues facing the world today; be they issues of immunity and fertility, or the way such things affects the global food supply; his art repeatedly questions the accepted perspective that has come through evolution and the free market. In one way, his capacity to inquire about what has happened, and have 247

us look again at what could happen if, is the fundamental principle that drives his artworks forward; in addition to these glorious installations, he continues to make paintings, drawings, video works, installations with taxidermy participants in the CCP project. He has written texts, delivered TED lectures, addressed Unesco, while his installations appear in biennales, and international exhibitions on a regular basis. His art speaks to the importance and universal presence of diversity in all species, and it looks at the edges of this topic where political and economic questions come into play, of discussions about the migratory movement of peoples, of the way in which diversity may affect immunity and fertility, of how domestication over centuries and millennium can be seen to affect the genetic behaviour chromosomes inside the different species; how on some level nature is the filament that connects all living things regardless of species. We come to understand on a sub atomic level where the similarities lie, Vanmechelen and his intuition take us from this micro understanding, to the widest macro view imaginable; only art can pose such questions in a way that will get our attention, and only such an artist can maintain both his innocence and curiosity to demand we look at these intricate and difficult subjects with courage.

LABIOMISTA will be inaugurated only in 2017, but Mario Botta was kind enough to show us around the studio he has designed. CR Vanmechelen is under the spell of the chicken and you fancy pigeons. Is it true that you arranged to communicate via carrier pigeons? MB That was one of Vanmechelen’s ideas (laughs). It hasn’t happened yet, but we haven’t given up on the plan but we do not want to give up the idea. CR A clip on YouTube shows you and Vanmechelen surveying the site in Zwartberg. You’re saying that ‘As soon as people enter the first part of LABIOMISTA, they should find themselves in a wilderness’. That reminds me of Vanmechelen’s own installations, where the visitor enters a jungle area and can hear the call of the chicken or the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus). MB ‘Just like the Impressionists needed mountains for their paintings, so Vanmechelen needs animals for his artistic universe, which is based on the concept of fertility. His birds needed to have a place of honour inside LABIOMISTA. The first part is a big cage, a kind of greenhouse if you prefer. Besides there will also be areas for the chickens and the eagles’.

2015 Mario Botta A Meeting Place for People and Animals Interview by Christof Rutten about LABIOMISTA, Koen Vanmechelen’s new studio LABIOMISTA, Koen Vanmechelen’s new studio, has been quite the challenge for Mario Botta. For the first time in a career spanning 50 years, the famous Swiss architect was asked to design a building for people and for animals. The project also presented the architect with another first, as it is his first black building, a reference to the coal that was once mined in this region. The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Evry, south of Paris, and the museum Watari-Um are but a few examples of the many buildings Mario Botta (1943, Mendrisio) has realised all over the world. Other local examples are the building La Fortezza in Maastricht and the recent Palazzo Botta in Genk. The latter is an office complex that houses, not only the architect office Buro B, but also an art gallery with work by Vanmechelen. It was here that the artist and the architect met for the first time and came to appreciate each other’s work so much that, when Vanmechelen decided to locate LABIOMISTA in Genk, he asked Mario Botta to develop the project. After the years spent in the old Gelatine Factory in Hasselt, LABIOMISTA – literally ‘mix of life’ – is Vanmechelen’s new studio. The complex, a mix of past and future, consists of three parts: — The old villa. Formerly the residence of the director of the Zwartberg coal mine and later of the owner of the Zwartberg Zoo, which closed in 1998. It was later extensively refurbished. The villa will serve as the entrance to LABIOMISTA and will house the Library of Collected Knowledge (L.O.C.K.) – a documentation centre that preserves the history of the mines and the heritage of knowledge accumulated by Vanmechelen’s Foundations (CC®P, CosmoGolem, Walking Egg and COMBAT) – and the OpUnDi (Open University of Diversity) together with a permanent collection of some of his works. — The studio. This new space was designed by Mario Botta. It houses the artist’s atelier, the offices, an auditorium and the spaces for the chickens and the birds of prey. — The park. A real intellectual zoo, where the different animals that have inspired Vanmechelen can live in a natural habitat (llamas, alpacas, wolves, camels, black storks, etc.)

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Why?

MB ‘To understand the work of Vanmechelen, it is important for the visitors of LABIOMISTA to meet the animals that inspired the artist. That’s why we conceived LABIOMISTA as a meeting place between people and animals’. CR

Had you ever designed such a mix before?

MB ‘No, this was the first time! Artists are definitely unconventional people, and the studio reflects this. LABIOMISTA is a place where different forms of life from our planet can find their place in an artistic workshop of sorts. That’s absolutely new!’ CR

An artist’s workshop, yet open to the public. How do you combine that?

MB ‘There are of course private rooms, where the artist and his collaborators can work undisturbed. But, as all the art of Vanmechelen is public, the structure of LABIOMISTA is completely transparent: visitors can wander through the whole building in the spaces below the offices (which are on the upper level). There are also rooms for the artist’s guests, an auditorium and, of course, the big park. LABIOMISTA looks like a farm, run by an artist who offers his visitors a trip full of surprises.’ CR

The structure of LABIOMISTA is sobre. It is not a spectacular building.

MB ‘No it isn’t, because the building should not be the attraction. The major feature here is the mix of people and animals, of city and country, the coming together of functions, emotions and creativity related to the main theme, which is fertility.’ CR And yet there is a definite eye-catcher here: a gigantic transparent cube in the centre – the cage for the Steller’s sea eagles. MB ‘This is a really important element. From our first meetings to discuss the concept of LABIOMISTA, it became clear that the eagles should get an equally prominent place as the people. The majesty of these regal birds required suitable accommodation. That’s why their house gives the impression of almost touching the sky.’ CR After the eagle cage there is the auditorium and the passageway to the park with the animals. What did you agree about that?

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MB ‘We want to wait with this, as the park is still to be finished. But of course, there will be room for the camels and the other animals important to Vanmechelen’s work.’ CR You have designed buildings from Tokyo to San Francisco but LABIOMISTA is your second project in Genk. Was this small city able to inspire you? MB ‘Yes, it did. I found my inspiration in its past, in the history of its coalmines. Genk was a place where people had to struggle to mine coal out of the ground. A hard way to earn your daily bread. People came from all over the world to Genk. That history, which you can still sense in town, was a great source of inspiration. I mean it when I say I love Genk’. CR The roof of the big cage at the entrance to LABIOMISTA looks a bit industrial. Is it also a reference to the mines? MB ‘Not quite. It is in the exterior of black bricks (literally coal-black) that I’ve added a stylistic element that evokes the history of Genk’s mining past. This is the first black building I’ve ever designed. As you see, this place did have a big effect on me!’ CR You are also famous for having designed, among other things, churches, cathedrals, mosques and other buildings in which you attempt to establish a link between architecture and the sacred. LABIOMISTA focuses on art and science. Is it a spiritual place too? MB ‘Yes, in a way... Vanmechelen’s art explores the boundaries between the conceptual and the biological. It expands the horizon and investigates unexplored territories. We live in the time of globalisation and trivialisation but here we have an artist who unabashedly searches for the origins of life and the mystery of death – the greatest mystery of all. Vanmechelen starts from the gift of fertility and works with the transmission and the continuation of life. That is an ethical aspect of his work that charms me. His approach may not be religious but the result certainly is spiritual.’

2017 James Putnam ‘Vision of The Owl’… there can be no light without the dark The title Vision of the Owl proposes that this exhibition can be perceived through eyes of the owl which being large convey the impression of high intelligence and wisdom. The owl’s vision is actually peripheral, although it can only look forwards; it is able to turn its head nearly 360 degrees, which has led to a folklore belief that it has supernatural powers. In the popular Harry Potter series of books and films, owls bridge the magical and real world and are used as a postal service for communication between wizards. The ability to predict weather conditions has also inspired a belief that owls can foretell the future or that when one is sighted it means a change is coming. In the context of this exhibition, the owl evokes associations with myth and magic but in a wider sense reflects the climate of uncertainty surrounding the current state of world affairs. Vision of the Owl is about conflict and how our society is dealing with it, a theme that Koen Vanmechelen explores using metaphors he has drawn from his vast experience of working with the animal world. Central to the exhibition is an installation with a gleaming steel sword suspended above a marble egg that symbolises the next generation. Its menacing presence alludes to the future struggle we’ve created for our successors. But there is still hope because although a sword is a lethal weapon, when it is combined with a snake it becomes the traditional emblem for medicine and healing. This dichotomy is re-echoed in Vanmechelen’s Medusa sculpture, the mythological female who combines beauty with terror to represent internal conflict. Her hair is a composite of venomous snakes and chicken heads, both predator and its prey. While snakes use their venom to immobilise and kill their prey, humans extract it to use as a life-saving medicine. The chickens in the Medusa’s hair also allude to medicine,

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since eggs are used in vaccines and other pharmaceutical products and traditional health potions. This juxtaposition of opposites is a feature of the exhibition supporting the notion that nothing can exist if its direct opposite does not also exist or in other words predator cannot exist without prey. Owls have a number of attributes that make it very successful at hunting its prey. They possess the vision and hearing to detect their prey in perfect darkness, while they remain undetectable, being silent in flight and well camouflaged. Their large eyes are extremely motion-sensitive and enable them to detect even the slightest movement. Vanmechelen perceives this predator-prey relationship as linked to the increase in global conflict. So those who feel preyed upon in turn become predators expressing their anger and hatred through tribal or racial tension that ultimately leads to the collapse of society. Predators usually possess excellent senses to find their prey and special abilities to capture the prey. And yet predator and prey evolve together, they are both part of each other’s environment and the conflict between them is connected to the wider eco system. As a nocturnal creature, the owl is linked to the full moon, which in turn relates to fertility and Vanmechelen’s ongoing project that involves crossbreeding chickens from different parts of the world to enhance their fertility. His work is concerned with proclaiming the importance of the ‘lowly’ domestic chicken whose migration he maintains is directly linked to the spread of civilisation. The exhibition includes a series of small portraits of chickens on gold leaf backgrounds in the style of ‘sacred’ medieval icons. But Vanmechelen’s work, it is not really about chickens but focused on the wider notion of diversity and the beneficial exchange of genetic material. His art poses fundamental questions about humanity, our identity as a species and the society we’ve created. He believes that diversity in context to the human race can lead to greater wisdom and knowledge. Vanmechelen’s practice is also concerned with the sacred bond between animals and humans embodied in the practice of shamanism. This equates with his artistic philosophy since shamanic practice is linked to respecting the natural environment and learning to live more in balance with the earth and its creatures. This is illustrated by his monumental image of a bearded, tattooed ‘Shaman’ with an owl perched on his ‘nest’ of dreadlocks. Traditionally the shaman is a spiritual practitioner who can travel into altered states of consciousness, a mediator between the sacred and secular. He also acts as a conduit to deliver divine messages to the community not only through rituals but also via symbols and metaphors. In Vision of the Owl Vanmechelen creates his own iconography using images and objects as metaphors in the great Belgian artistic tradition of René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. The techniques of shamanism can be used for gaining physical resistance to illness and negative energy. Communicating with the spirits to receive knowledge and teachings of plants, animals, and the elements. Shamans use their ‘powers’ for the benefit of their community helping to solve difficult problems, to heal illness and to exorcise negative energy. Vanmechelen finds a kindred spirit in the work of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), the artist most identified with shamanism who created performances and objects with the intent to heal. But the enigmatic stare of Vanmechelen’s shaman has a sense of ambiguity in that it leaves us uncertain whether he is malevolent or friendly and if he is truly a fortune-teller or like us is helpless to know the future. His coat of chicken feathers also becomes a hanging sculpture with a taxidermy owl that peers out as if enclosed within a tree hollow. The exhibition also includes living chickens from Vanmechelen’s cross-breeding project, kept in a large iron cage while a pair of taxidermy owls perched high up in the gallery stare at them with their wise ‘all knowing’ eyes. In the mind of the chicken this gaze is full of danger because the owl is a predator and they are its prey. Although his taxidermy owls pose no threat to the living chickens their presence is nevertheless foreboding and symbolic. This serves to remind us that whatever wisdom we may have accrued through the course of history we continue to live under the threat of impending danger and conflict. Vanmechelen’s shaman symbolises the balance between good and evil and the hope to build a brighter future amidst gloomy and uncertain times. With its seemingly supernatural senses, the owl helps guide us through the dark tunnels of fear, change and unknowing to the light at the other end. But we need to remember there can be no light without the dark.

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2018 Rod Mengham Let there be Lucy In early 2018, I travelled to the studio of Koen Vanmechelen in Genk, at a time when the Limburg district of Flanders was gripped by the news that a wolf, nicknamed Naya, had crossed the German-Belgian border, and was now in hiding, whereabouts unknown. The wolf had not actually been seen by anyone, but was being remotely tracked by a German scientist. Its invisibility made this heavily populated area seem suddenly more wild than the inhabitants had assumed. It was possible that other wolves had been in the area before; and might be there now. One theory, half serious, half joking, was that Naya had heard the rumours of a safe haven for wildlife being constructed on the grounds of the old Limburg Zoo that had closed down in 1997. And it was indeed the case that Vanmechelen, who remembered visiting the zoo as a child, had moved onto the site, and had such a project in mind, installing a large aviary for jungle fowl at one end of his studio, with plans to de-domesticate a number of different species and install them in the large tract of land between the studio building and the national park that lay on the other side of the perimeter fence. Those species with a long history of domestication would be located close to the studio; those with no history of domestication would be furthest from its walls; those in the outermost area of the property would be wolves. The main objective of Vanmechelen’s scheme is not to replace one zoo with another, although the outcome of the experiment might be a kind of human zoo. Contemporary culture is such that our perception of animals is governed largely by the terms and conditions of the spectacle, and a primary function of the zoo is to place other species at our disposal in a form of display case that has no regard for their intrinsic connection to habitat. Vanmechelen’s project involves returning the animals to a natural habitat within the grassland and woodland extending beyond his studio. The human component within this scenario will be contained within corridors that take up only a fraction of the total space. Humans will be herded, or shepherded, by fencing arrangements while other species will be given much more freedom to roam. Visitors will exercise their natural curiosity but the fact is that other species may keep them under watch with ease while taking cover themselves. This will be less a case of people watching animals than of animals watching people. How the animals see us is an impossible question to answer but it remains an important principle that humanity should exercise its imagination to consider the impact of its behaviour on other species. Vanmechelen regards it as an ethical imperative that we should put ourselves imaginatively in the animal’s place and draw the appropriate conclusions. Why Genk? Vanmechelen explains that he is drawn to this locality because it is a ‘wounded place’ crying out to be healed. The wounds he refers to are social and economic in the main, although the economy and social structure of this area were for several hundred years intertwined with coal mining, with the corollary that the landscape itself has been scarred, and the environment degraded by the creation of slag heaps and industrial pollution. The region of Limburg included the biggest coal mines in Europe, which attracted large scale immigration into the area. The population had increased by a factor of ten, with the majority of the population dependent on the industry, when the mines were closed in the 1960s. This replaced an ecological catastrophe with a social and economic disaster. In Genk, the problem was offset by the establishment of a big Ford plant in the 1960s, but this closed in 2014, creating widespread unemployment and an urgent need to decontaminate the area in the vicinity of the plant. Genk is still living in the shadow of this environmental ordeal. Limburg is a region that cannot be mapped with reference to modern state boundaries. For seven centuries until the late eighteenth century, it was an independent state within the Holy Roman Empire, then divided up between Belgium, Germany, and Holland. Limburgish survives as a colloquial language within all three countries. Limburg is therefore a condition, a state of mind, and being that cannot be identified through association with one nationality or another. According to Sean Rainbird, in his study of the Celtic dimension in the work of Joseph Beuys, Beuys’s home town of Cleves meant that he grew up in a Celtic and Catholic enclave within a Germanic and Protestant state. The Duchy of Cleves overlapped with the Limburg province of Holland. The significance of the Celtic connection was the emphasis found in Celtic tradition on the natural world as source of spiritual meaning. Although belonging to different generations, Beuys and Vanmechelen both retrieve the connections between humanity and the natural world that have been travestied in the destruction of habitats and the commercial exploitation of animals during the industrial and post-industrial periods. One 252

of Beuys’s most well-known and characteristic works took the form of an ‘action’ in which he remained for three days behind a wire mesh partition in René Block’s New York Gallery, in the company of a coyote, close relative to the wolf and indigenous to North America. This performance of sorts was a reminder that humanity had evolved alongside other species while occupying the same biosphere. If their past relationship had been competitive it was now unevenly weighted in favor of Homo sapiens – although an encounter between individual members of the two species might well readjust the balance. The result was an edgy ‘performance’ in which nothing much happened, although it was possible to imagine several possible outcomes. This meeting of predators was both humbling and revealing in its focus on the extent to which humanity had appropriated to its own use an environment in which other species retained a right to exist on their own terms. The ethos of Beuys’s art practice is very close to that of Vanmechelen. Beuys generated a number of conceptual projects anticipating the political agenda of the Green movement – he advocated the founding of a political party for animals – and also performed actions that directly challenged corporate threats to the environment: for example, by sponsoring the planting of forests. But, by and large, Beuys’s sphere of operation was the art gallery, the lecture theatre, the defined performance space. These are also essential sites for Vanmechelen’s practice, but more often than not, his multivalent artworks are connected to other direct actions of a political nature, contributing to the economic viability and ecological sustainability of livestock farming in a given community. Central to his thinking and still at the core of his activity have been the interlinked Cosmopolitan Chicken Project and Planetary Community Chicken. The guiding principle of both projects has been diversity and involves nothing less than a reversal of the history of animal breeding. During the pre-industrial era, animal breeders accrued cultural capital, and secured the market value of their stock, through the preservation of exclusive ‘thoroughbred’ strains, with pedigrees that mimicked the priority given to ‘blue blood’ alliances between the aristocratic families of Europe. During the industrial era, different kinds of inbreeding were explored in order to maximise the profit to be realised from animals cultivated exclusively for excessive meat or egg yields. The chicken was to become the most grotesquely exploited and de-natured of all these animals, in factory farms that removed the animal’s access to all functions apart from that of egg and meat production. Vanmechelen, recognising this as a prime example of humanity’s prioritising its own needs at the expense of all other species during the Anthropocene era, uses the settings of art to provide a focus on a genuinely practical intervention in contemporary farming practices. On his own property, he practises cross-breeding between different varieties of chicken that are free to roam, with results that improve both the fertility and immunity of successive generations. This humane farming practices is then made the focus for an international network of cross-breeding projects that serve as inspiration for the spread of local, sustainable modes of animal husbandry, operating outside the factory-farming systems of international conglomerates. It is a rival form of globalised practice that both enhances animal welfare and benefits local communities. The Planetary Community Chicken Project is in effect a growing network of sites where the role of art is twofold: in practical terms, it provides the foundation for a mode of farming that improves the resilience of local livestock strains; and in political terms, it identifies diversity as an essential factor in the creation of more open, tolerant, and productive social relations – it forms the basis for the imagined communities of the future. In an era of mass migrations and resurgent nationalisms, it orchestrates an alternative pattern of migrations aimed at diversifying existing communities and assisting their evolution. In the process, it places art at the centre of some of the most crucial debates of our time; and dramatically widens the scope of the so-called ‘creative’ industries, by transforming creative ideas into direct actions – actions that interrupt the supply chains of the global corporate farming industry. At the same time as Vanmechelen’s art is re-framing the social politics of farming, by changing the direction of its historical development; in the same proportion, his practical interventions in the gene pool of the chicken species are re-framing the language of art by giving it different registers in which to speak. The occasions to speak come out of a series of experiments: encounters with the unknown, the previously untried, the un-languaged; our understanding of other species is entirely based on observation of behaviours that do not conform with ours; we cannot translate what we cannot read; we can only imagine; and the role of art is to imagine responsibly. This is the keynote of Vanmechelen’s work. Among the works on display in the Serlachius Museum are three largescale drawings that resemble in style and medium the earliest examples of artwork so far discovered. In the cave paintings of Europe, human figures are rare, and when they occur, they have been sketched 253

in as incidental details of a scene dominated by animal figures. It is the animal figures that impress and engross our attention, memory, and imagination. Vanmechelen’s imposing images reflect the intimate attention given by prehistoric humans to the animals in their environment – an attention compounded of fascination, fear, and reverence. Using materials equivalent to those used by the prehistoric artist – grain, Indian pigments, egg yolk, and egg white – Vanmechelen has conjured up a being, or beings, from an earlier stage of evolution than our own: these are indefinite creatures that seem to hover between dinosaur, bird, and mammal. It is their effect on us that is definite: these are creatures it is difficult or impossible to imagine as under our control and at our disposal. They are creatures that we might live alongside, but only with a due amount of respect for their power and inscrutability. They take up a commanding position within an environment we share with them but only on terms that are never settled. In cultures that remain closer to nature than our own, those terms are negotiated by intermediaries, known as shamans. Shamanism has various manifestations but invariably includes entry into a trance-like state for the purpose of intercession with the spirit-world. In the traditional religions of northern Europe, the spirit world included the spirits of animals as well as those of ancestors and deities. In Finnish paganism, for example, the bear was a sacred animal whose death required prayer and intercession to persuade the animal to reincarnate and return to the forest. In Vanmechelen’s lightbox installation that is part of the Lucy project, a figure clad in a shamanic cloak is seen framed in the doorway of a pigsty together with a large, feral-looking pig that he is either guiding or following. Vanmechelen has positioned them precisely on the threshold between inside and outside, clearly acknowledging the importance of bridging the gap between one state and another: between animal and human; between spiritual and carnal. The shaman’s cloak, incorporating animal bones, hides, and feathers is found in the surviving practices of many traditional religions. The feathers of birds were an essential component of such costumes in the Celtic tradition. In his ensemble Domestication (2014), Vanmechelen has placed the cloak on a tailor’s dummy, beside the plumage of a turkey placed on a glass and ceramic model of a turkey’s body. The juxtaposition converts our perception of the animal as a source of meat into a conception of its place in nature, outside the industrialised food-chain invented by humanity, and inside a version of the world where it might even have a sacred importance. Another tradition in Finnish paganism has particular resonance for the avian iconography of Vanmechelen’s work, and that is the belief that the world itself was hatched from the egg of a sacred bird. The enormous marble egg entitled In Between (2012) is a monumental tribute to the process of creation. It uses materials – Carrara marble and gold – whose prestige is unsurpassed in the history of sculpture, in order to declare the importance of one of the commonest, and most undervalued, of everyday objects: the supermarket egg. In this particular instance, ‘everyday’ means precisely what it says – humanity’s symbiosis with the chicken over thousands of years has so distorted the natural productivity of the animal that battery hens will now produce eggs on a diurnal basis. Consumerist demand has been accelerated through the practice of date-stamping to indicate an often arbitrary terminus beyond which consumption is considered unsafe. Vanmechelen’s giant egg has been date stamped with Roman numerals – normally reserved for commemoration of portentous or historic dates – which spell out a date not to be found in the calendar. The sarcastic message of this work is that there is no time-limit to the idea of the egg, which represents a crucial stage in the evolution of all species, pre-dating, and outranking the significance of the human in the history of the planet. Marble and gold are the very least among the materials that could be used to underline the egg’s significance. The history of humanity itself opens up a series of questions about the means by which Homo sapiens has prevailed over other species: including hominid species. The most well-known ancestor of contemporary humanity was the Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed Lucy by the team who excavated the fossil remains of this female specimen. But Lucy represents only one of at least twenty hominid species, all of which are now extinct – apart from us. Our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals, survived until recently, roughly 20,000 years ago. They had larger brains; but without a voice-box, they lacked the capacity to communicate in a language complex enough to master time – they could not plan ahead with the precision needed for attack or defence in their encounters with modern humans. By invoking a distant ancestor of humanity, and transferring her given name Lucy to a new breed of pig, Vanmechelen is insisting that we recognise our original connection to other mammal species (the pig is anatomical254

ly very close to the human, which is why its organs are used so often in life-saving transplant operations) rather than insisting on our exceptional status, based on a short-lived position of dominance that has led the ecosystem to the verge of extinction. As a symbolic gesture of the change of attitude required, Vanmechelen has used the settings and methods of art to dramatise the issues at stake in our current mishandling of relations with other species, while also aligning his symbolic language with practical demonstrations of the effect of local changes in the social, political and economic priorities of specific communities. His installation Domesticated Giant (2015) references human agency as disproportionate in its effect on the environment; but suggests how its role might be as disproportionately positive as it is now disproportionately negative. His outsized bronze hands are irresistibly reminiscent of the gigantic bronze hand that, together with the stone head and part of an arm, are all that remain of the colossal statue of the Emperor Constantine that once stood near the Forum Romanum in Rome. It was Constantine who established Christianity as a state religion, sounding the death knell for pagan religions in which relations between humanity and the natural world had been sacralised. That he was able to do so was a direct consequence of the political effectiveness of imperialism. Vanmechelen’s art practice is effectively summed up by its difference from the hand of Constantine, pointing the finger of authority in an imperial setting; Vanmechelen’s two bronze hands are cradling models of a single, vulnerable chick and a handful of seeds: they are the open hands of nurture – very much hands-on – contrasting with the closed hand of a remote and intransigent imperialism.

2018 Hanna Johansson Koen Vanmechelen’s Art And Political Ecology: Contemporaneity and Biocultural Diversity ‘…In some way we are all related and interconnected, part of the same universe.’ Koen Vanmechelen In summer 2018, a flock of chickens struts around the courtyard of Joenniemi Manor. They are part of the Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen’s exhibition It’s About Time. The chickens are new breeds crossbred for the exhibition and are part of Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken (CCP) and Planetary Community Chicken (PCC) projects. The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) was launched at the end of the 1990s. In the CCP, Vanmechelen crossbreeds chickens from around the world as a study of the impact and significance of cultural and biological diversification. His aim is to converge the genes of all chicken breeds across the world into a Cosmopolitan Chicken genome. With the Planetary Community Chicken project, Vanmechelen brings this new global diversity back to the communities around the world, by crossing the global diversity of the Cosmopolitan Chicken with the productivity of a local commercial bird. This is thus a kind of migration movement in which new breeds of chicken gradually spread around the world while their genetic material is renewed at the same time. Vanmechelen is an artist who does astonishing things and brings about wonders. His work is both logical and chaotic, and goes in surprising directions. Vanmechelen’s art, in turn, shifts effortlessly from the concrete, biological and material world to symbolist, conceptual, and linguistic realms. Thus, the core of the It’s About Time exhibition at the Serlachius Museums in Mänttä – as in Vanmechelen’s art – is a flock of chickens. Nevertheless, the chickens we see in the yard at Joenniemi Manor, and whose relatives we meet inside the Museum, are no more than a by-product of Vanmechelen’s artistic work. The preparations for It’s About Time have involved crossing two breeds of chicken. First, the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP, 1999–) has produced the Mechelse Maatiaiskana, which is a mixture of the 21st Cosmopolitan Chicken generation, the Mechelse Danish, and the native Finnish Hornio Landrace chicken. The Mechelse Maatiaiskana then became part of the Planetary Community Chicken (PCC, 2016–) project when it was crossed with a commercially developed industrial chicken, the Dekalb White. Thus, an industrial chicken living in Finland

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has acquired new genetic material from the 22 generations of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, each representing a different national or regional identity. This process improves the genetic diversity of the local commercial breed and enriches the gene pool of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project at the same time. This can strengthen the chickens’ resilience to disease and possibly increase their lifespan. Cross-breeding chickens takes us to the conceptual core of the artist’s work; to the idea that the wellbeing of people, animals and plants, and also cultures, depends on diversity. Koen Vanmechelen crosses biology and cultural emblems and concepts so that the result is a multiplied biocultural diversity. For him, the biological and the cultural are not distinct islands but are intermingled in various ways and inseparable. The global ecological community to which we humans belong, just as much as all that is animate and inanimate, needs not only regeneration and mixing, but also new ideas, customs, and cultural practices that will enrich ecosystems, local social communities and, ultimately, the whole world. Thus, alongside the field of biology, Vanmechelen’s work is also aimed at multiculturalism, while representing a trenchant comment of eugenics and gene technology’s pursuit of monoculture. Vanmechelen is known as a chicken artist but he makes a lot more than new breeds of chicken. With his manifold work that is processed in many directions, he points the way for artists of the future. His art gives rise to new experimental lifeforms that can change the world – and make it a bit more resilient and sustainable. The common theme in his wide-ranging oeuvre – as reflected in the title of the It’s About Time exhibition at the Serlachius Museums – is time. The title can be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, it prompts us to recognise that Vanmechelen’s art is about time. Secondly, It’s About Time refers to the fact that ‘it really is about time’. Both possible meanings epitomise Vanmechelen’s art. On the one hand, the title refers to the time of the artwork, a lifetime or the right moment for the birth of life. On the other hand, It’s About Time can mean that art happens and is rooted in its own historical timeframe and its urgent necessity. Vanmechelen’s work as an artist is action taken at this precise historical moment. His art meets the demands of the moment and at the same time directs our gazes to the future. In summary, Koen Vanmechelen fulfills the demands of the present moment. According to philosophers who have investigated contemporaneity, it is a specific attitude to the present moment. Contemporaneity can, for example, be deconstructed as an artistic activity and as a ‘fundamental gesture’, which creates the world, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy proposes.1 The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for his part, understands contemporaneity as signifying a particularly intense attachment to the present. Nevertheless, it involves both an ability to detach oneself from that present moment and to view it, as it were, from a distance. According to Agamben: ‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. […] But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.’2 Agamben thinks that people with a profound understanding of contemporaneity live, as it were, in the shadow of the present moment. They see the vagueness, the incompleteness, and the darkness of the current era, and thus are not intoxicated by the brilliance of the actual moment and what we see in it. ‘In our case, this ability amounts to a neutralization of the lights that come from the epoch in order to discover its obscurity, its special darkness.’3 Comparably, for Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche, contemporaneity signifies a temporal rift, a prematurity or out-of-jointness with the time. It would appear that contemporaneity is characterised by a firm attachment to the obligations inherent in a certain temporal moment, obligations that, however, defy the manifest meanings of that age. Thus, the character of contemporaneity includes a profound understanding of the present moment, but also requires a distancing of oneself from the obvious characteristics of the age. Vanmechelen works in Zwartberg, on the outskirts of the city of Genk in Belgium. In his newly completed LABIOMISTA studio there is space for people, animals, art, and science. LABI-

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OMISTA means the mixing of life. It also speaks of the intention that is at the core of Vanmechelen’s work: to combine and crossbreed things in a new way, and thus to add to biocultural diversity. The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project and Planetary Community Chicken have emerged out of cross-couplings, and in the long run they will reinforce and support life by opposing the ethos of uniformity and of pure race and culture, and by producing new breeds and variations. With these projects Vanmechelen is also going against the prevailing norms of breeding. He is protecting and preserving the genome of original chicken breeds by crossing them with his Cosmopolitan Chicken and subsequently with commercially developed industrial chickens. In doing so, he gives rise to new generations of chickens. Chickens that result from cross-breeding have proved to be healthier and longer-lived than pure, thorough-bred breeds. In addition to cross-breeding chickens, Vanmechelen has, for instance, crossed pigs and cows. Lucy is one such pig that came about in collaboration with a Dutch pig farmer Heyde Hoeve – it is a cross between a Duroc and a Hungarian cold-resistant Mangalica. Meanwhile, in the Sotwa project (2014), Vanmechelen crossed the Maasai people’s indigenous cattle with a Kenyan cow in order to make the indigenous breed’s gene pool stronger to withstand the dryness caused by climate change. At his home Vanmechelen also raises camels and dromedaries, alpacas, and llamas, which have been observed to carry unique antibodies. Researchers believe that these antibodies could be used as a basis for developing drugs to combat many intractable diseases, such as coronary-artery disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. In his Lifebank installation, Vanmechelen has developed a nutrient cycle. He grows oyster mushrooms on sterilised camel dung and feeds these oyster mushrooms to chickens. The chickens, in turn, lay eggs, and the eggs are used to feed people. Actively maintaining and increasing diversity is specifically one of the requirements linked to contemporaneity. Diversity means the opposite of monoculture, and in that sense it sets itself up in opposition to the perceived present – insofar as the present is defined as the prevailing cultural reality. The present is, in fact, globally dominated by a technological way of life, which on every level supports a monoculture. This conformity-oriented bio culture has developed as a result of the modern ethos ideals of knowledge, technology, economics and culture. The same cultural ethos has appropriated nature as a resource that is available to humankind, a resource whose maximal exploitation is the goal of our culture. Thus, human beings have adopted convergence and the reduction of differences between cultures as the goal of their own actions. The only force for change in this ideal model for modern life is continual development and growth.4 It has been assumed that behind the culture that idealises growth and development is Nature that always remains the same, and which humankind has relied on and trusted in throughout history. In the minds of many contemporaries, we are at this moment globally witnesses to catastrophes generated by modern life. Climate change and the sixth wave of extinction have become a reality, even to those sceptics who seek to deny them to the last. Now, Nature has become unreliable as a consequence of humankind’s own actions, as the Finnish environmental politician Yrjö Haila has said. Humans have thus given rise to a ‘Nature’ whose global ecological consequences it is impossible to predict.5 Koen Vanmechelen’s artistic work, which constantly generates new hybrid breeds and new ecosystem models, is actively resisting an increasingly standardised global bio culture. In this sense Vanmechelen is of his time. He works in the space formed by the schism and the rift of the age, or in the shadow of the present moment. Vanmechelen sees the demands of the moment but there is no counterpart to his work in current reality. Nevertheless, he creates places, spaces, breeds, and experiences that definitively change the possibilities for being in the world.

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Dead Animals Animals are born, they grow, they interbreed, but also die. Vanmechelen never kills his animals but allows them to die naturally. He uses animal carcasses and parts of dead animals in his works. He conserves animals and has dozens of stuffed chickens in his studio, with a collection of them being shown in the Serlachius Museums exhibition. In contemporary art, the use of mounted animals is not particularly exceptional, and animals are in many ways a popular subject, material, and tool in art. At the same time, our culture has entered a post-humanist age that calls anthropocentrism into question. This cultural breakthrough has also called into question the absolute difference between humans and animals. Researchers have observed that animals have characteristics that they were not previously believed to have, such as a capacity for empathy and emotions.6 This so-called ‘animal turn’ has happened since people woke up to the disappearance of animals from our culture, as a result of changes in means of livelihood and ways of living, and of extinctions. For Koen Vanmechelen animals represent a lot more than just objects that he uses in his art. They are a precondition of physical and material life, and also radiate ritualistic and animistic energy when both alive and dead. As a prototype for Vanmechelen’s animal art we can see, on the one hand, Helen and Newton Harrison’s project with a pig called Wilma in Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1 (1970–1971, 2012). On the other hand, his work with animals is also comparable to the way the German artist Joseph Beuys (1922–1986) appeared with animals in his art. For Beuys the animal was a profoundly aware partner, who could have considerable links with the birth of cultural meanings. In his animal performances, Beuys focused attention on the ‘trauma points’ of modern society, and with his actions sought to achieve symbolic and political healing, such as to give birth to a better, more sustainable and more just society. I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), Beuys’s famous performance in René Block’s New York gallery, was carried out with an animal sacred to Native Americans, a coyote, which the white conqueror had condemned to subjugation. Here the coyote represented the USA’s indigenous population and wild nature and Beuys himself, in turn, the western white man and his culture. In the performance the two were supposed to become reconciled, to create a possibility of atoning for humanity’s crimes against nature and against the indigenous population of the U.S. The live coyote was an exception; the animal usually present in Beuys’s actions was a dead hare, which served as the one who understood and was the recipient of art, as in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), or as a mediator and builder of a connection between East and West in Eurasia Siberian Symphony (1963).7 Vanmechelen’s Under My Skin (2014) is a fur coat made out of CCP chicken feathers, which in the It’s About Time exhibition is shown being worn by a mannequin doll. Judging by the photographs, the coat can also be seen as a good fit on the artist himself. Like Beuys, Vanmechelen does not put the animal on a pedestal or leave it alone, but makes use of it and simultaneously shows its multiple meanings. The mounted chickens in the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project are – as conserved birds have always been – both copies of themselves and restored animals.8 They stand in exemplary postures, shoulder to shoulder on a storeroom shelf. This arrangement is confusing: the chickens appear to be either in a museum storeroom, from where they can be brought into use whenever necessary, or then the whole lot have been transferred along with the shelves to be on show in the exhibition space. This tradition of displaying animals is reminiscent, on the one hand, of the way in which animals have generally been displayed in western countries: arrayed side by side in a way typical of their species. On the other hand, the manner in which Vanmechelen places the flock of chickens alongside each other nobly facing the viewer gives the chickens, too, a chance to shine as individuals, with each of them appearing through the unique, specific characteristic of each crossbreed, and the arrangement becomes a collection of portraits. Vanmechelen’s works conduct a dialogue about many aspects of our culture’s attitude to animals. In addition to the chicken shelf, the exhibition displays also other works that make liberal use of taxidermy, such as Artificial Cross-breeding (2014), Under my skin (2014) and a series of Medusa’s heads (Medusa, 2018). In these sculptures, taxidermy is used ‘wrongly’, to quote the expression used by Steve Baker, who has studied the use of animals in contemporary art.

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Baker has observed that in contemporary artists’ practice taxidermy is disconnected from the two fundamental properties that tie it faithfully to the original animal: the skin (derma), and arrangement (taxis). Baker refers to the way that contemporary artists apply the taxidermy tradition as ‘botched’ taxidermy, in which, for example, various materials are mixed together, toy animals are stuffed, hybrid animal shapes are made, and the principles of taxidermy are otherwise applied in an odd way.9 In Vanmechelen’s art the animal is removed from its purported proper, original ideal, and a cross-breeding of animal species and materials is carried out using the means of botched taxidermy. The birds in Artificial Crossbreeding have been fashioned out of peacock feathers, a glass body, and a ceramic skull. In the Medusa series, the cross-coupling is extended to Greek mythology, with the snakes on the heads of the four female monsters of different skin colours joined by chickens. While in the year 2000, Baker still considered it sensible to distinguish between animal-endorsing or ‘green’ animal art and animal-sceptical, that is, postmodern animal art, the division begins to appear pointless at the latest in Vanmechelen’s case. His lesson for us is that we have to be postmodern and break away from originality, purity and the ‘correct’ in order to encourage life and its continuation.10 In addition to the use of animals, what Joseph Beuys and Koen Vanmechelen have in common is the way they behave as artists and extend the boundaries of artisthood by mixing into this role the tasks of both the activist and the educator. Through Vanmechelen’s activism his community is radically changed, and all of us humans who come within the realm of art are educated to understand the importance of not only chickens but also of new ecological connections. Life and Art Vanmechelen’s artistic work carries on the tradition that began in contemporary art in the 1960s that aims to combine art and life. Vanmechelen’s art mixes life and art in at least two ways: his whole life is his artistic work, and he works on bare life in his art. Drawing the line between art and life and obliterating the distinction between them has been one of the key themes in art since the 1960s. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, Allan Kaprow in the USA was one of the first to put into words the need to bring art closer to life and to events that occur in everyday life.11 Almost in the same breath Joseph Beuys declared that everyone is an artist and all actions are art. In the 1960s and 1970s, these views, which emerged in opposition to the modern principles of ‘art for art’s-sake’ thinking and pure art, spread widely to become a norm in the making of art. The concept of life formulated by Allan Kaprow, nevertheless, differs from the concept of life that Koen Vanmechelen promotes in his art. When Kaprow transposed life into art, he drew attention to his own everyday chores, such as cleaning his teeth and making coffee, and viewed them as art. Meanwhile, at the core of Vanmechelen’s art is the birth and renewal of bare biological life and, even more specifically, cross-breeding and the diversity that results from it. For this reason, he can also be called a bioartist. Where the bioartist’s attention is focused on biological and genetic processes in themselves, the goal of Vanmechelen’s artistic work is on broader cultural change and on creating of the conditions for sustainable life. In this sense Vanmechelen’s art is linked more specifically to the art and to the stage in the shared history of life that the art historian and philosopher Boris Groys refers to as ‘art documentation’.12 Groys developed this concept having realised at the start of the 2000s that the most important art exhibitions were showing not artworks but more and more installations that documented life and its occurrences in photographs, films, drawings, writing or paintings. Such works have not been by definition art, but only refer to an artwork that has happened elsewhere and which is already over. Groys put forward the view that these different activities, whose documentation now filled exhibition spaces, could not be displayed as works that came about as the result of a creative process, since in their case the activity itself is the art. Hence, this activity cannot be put on display as an artwork, but it is only possible to refer to it in various forms of documentation. ‘For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather than of artworks, art is identical to life, because life is essentially a pure activity that does not lead to any

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end result’,13 Groys writes. The goal of art documentation is to use the artistic medium in the space of art to refer to life itself, that is, to pure activity. Groys sees art here as being biopolitical when it starts to use artistic means to produce life solely as an event.

of system theories and cybernetics, when ecology also began to break away from what was purely biology.16

Groys’s interpretation fits Vanmechelen quite aptly. It is not actually possible to transpose cross-breeding and diversity as such into art, since they are events linked to the genesis of life, events whose material signs or traces are chickens. Vanmechelen’s artistic production is thus literally a process of producing new life, even to the extent that the endless production of constantly regenerating life can be thought of as being his passion.

In Decolonizing Nature (2016) the art researcher T. J. Demos classes the art of the latter half of the 20th century into three ecological phases: the environmental restoration work of the 1960s; the cybernetic-environmental systems of the 1970s; and the age of political ecology of the 1990s and 2000s.17 Nowadays, political-ecology projects are wide-ranging attempts to change the ecological conditions and thinking in a certain place. That is why they combine biology, technology, economics, and socio-cultural management. Thus, characteristic of the art of political ecology is wide-ranging action to change the world or a particular community or place.18

Here the process of producing life is both ‘natural’ and artificial as technological. Vanmechelen reconciles life with its artificial continuation, and anchors it to a real place, such as Finland, and to history of the place. The generations of chickens that he has crossbred are spreading around the globe; they serve and support the preservation of the viability of that place. Vanmechelen’s art is thus a giving birth to life, which defines him as a biopolitical artist.

‘We may need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means something closed, something we can be sure of, something that remains the same,’19 Timothy Morton claims. He, along with others, has become known as an ecological thinker who approaches ecology without Nature.

At the same time, nevertheless, Vanmechelen also produces art objects and keeps a careful watch on the stages on which he displays his own art. He is aware of the contexts in which his works are shown, which is why it appears that in his case the boundary between life and art becomes messier. It both melts away and remains standing firm. But, as Groys proposes at the end of his text, the only place for art that has turned into ‘bare life’ is, in the end, the exhibition context. Life is nothing in itself, but gets its identity when a living being is inscribed into the context of life – into a lifespan and a living state. In the case of art, this living context is the exhibition context, where material traces that refer to birth and diversification of life, and which produces authentic, living experiences in viewers, takes on a new meaning.14 In Vanmechelen’s art, the concept of exhibition is very wide. Political Ecology and Art ‘It is difficult, if not impossible to actually see ecological relationships, for they occur either too slowly or in too diffuse a manner to be observed directly. (…) But while ecology cannot be seen, one can see its influences within works of art.’15 Vanmechelen is not just a biopolitical artist, but also an ecological one. The meaning of the word ‘ecology’ derives from the conceptual history developed by Ernst Haeckel in the mid19th century. According to Haeckel, ‘Oecologie’ means a combination of household (oikos) and knowledge (logos), and thus ecology studies the relationship between all organisms and the environment in which they live. This early meaning of ecology fits Vanmechelen’s work, since wherever his animals are born, they relate to their dwelling place. This is not a laboratory, but a geographical and cultural landscape where there is a certain climate and biotope. The artist himself, too, lives and works in a certain place, on the outskirts of Genk in Belgium. Biocultural diversity and firm ties to the place go along with all the relationships that he forms in his work. In his LABIOMISTA studio Vanmechelen makes his art and plans exhibitions. At his home, a few kilometres from the studio, the artist raises the animals. The old villa beside the studio serves as a research and study forum, and the adjacent allotments are tended by city residents, more than half of whom are of foreign descent and represent 85 nationalities. A 25-hectare nature park is part of LABIOMISTA. In the park area, there was a coal mine at the start of the 20th century and a zoo in 1966–1997. Now, this city park run wild awaits reopening in the spring of 2019, when Vanmechelen will move the animals from his home farm to live there. According to the artist’s plans, the structure of the park will be arranged into three zones, the first of which will feature tame animals that will gradually begin to live together with semi-feral animals. At the furthest end of the park will host wild animals. Thus, the park will function in the way that land and human beings should function; it will offer room for the tame and the untamed, the cultivated and the un-interfered-with. The meaning of the word ‘ecology’ has changed repeatedly since Haeckel’s time. Gradually, as the mid-20th century arrived, ecology began to interest artists, too, especially in the wake

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According to Morton, ecological thought and action require us to give up on nature, since it has failed to serve ecology well. On the contrary, holding onto the distinction between nature and culture that derives from the heritage of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, has contributed to causing many of the problems that today’s contemporaries consider fateful for the future of the world.20 That is why we have to stop talking about nature and concentrate instead on understanding ecological processes. Or we should focus on thinking about action that sustains a life that has been turned via biology and genetics into the form of information. It is then also possible to learn to detect the multifarious connections between things. Even though ecological relationships cannot be seen, specifically art can make the effects of ecology visible, as James Nisbet contends. Art offers ecology and ecological thinking an empirical interface or meeting point, where both ecological processes and the related ways of thinking can be addressed. Real art that deals with ecology can be understood as a kind of testbed for ecological ideas. In the beginning of this article, I claimed that the chickens that Vanmechelen displays are by-products of his art, and that his art is an invisible process of regenerating and reproducing life. However, it is impossible to exhibit chickens as art objects, since ultimately it is never possible to bring life itself to a halt. I would, nevertheless, maintain that his art objects – sculptures, photographs, paintings – are also by-products of, and supplementary to, the processes of life and ecology. When I stated at the beginning that Vanmechelen’s chickens are the core of his art and at the same time only an excuse or by-product of artistic activity, I wanted to place the emphasis on the ecosystem that he has generated, which gives a direction to life and makes it possible. Perhaps the most concrete work in which this life-giving energy and the artwork meet is the incubator. It both incubates eggs into chickens and is an object in an exhibition space: it is precisely there that authentic life is born in art. Koen Vanmechelen is a contemporary artist, whose activities combine, at the very least, life, biopolitics, political ecology, posthumanism, the new alliance of science and art, and community art. In his actions, all of these serve the demands of a contemporaneity that derives its energy from a desire to carry on life and to give birth to a world in which life will have meaning in the future, too. Vanmechelen’s actions are aimed at bringing about a change, and they support the continuity of life in today’s world with its depleting natural resources. Art for Vanmechelen is an event, a constant energy supply. It gives birth to things in the world that in their turn carry on life. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Nancy, Jean-Luc 2010, pp. 98–99. Art Today. Journal of Visual Culture, vol 9. N:o 1. Agamben, Giorgio 2009, p. 40. What is the Contemporary? In What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio 2009, p. 44–45. Morton, Timothy 2010, pp. 5–6. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Demos, T. J. 2016, pp. 8–10. Decolonizing nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Kokkonen, Tuija 2017, e.g. pp. 212–215. Esityksen mahdollinen luonto – suhde ei-inhimilliseen esitystapahtumassa keston ja potentiaalisuuden näkökulmasta. Helsinki: Teatterikorkeakoulu Acta Scenica. Adams, David 1992, pp. 26–34. Joseph Beuys. Pioneer of a Radical Ecology. Art Journal vol. 51.

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According to Magnus von Wright, the aim of bird conservation was ‘återgifva naturen i dess sköna gestalt’ (to reproduce nature in its beautiful form) i.e. both to represent and to restore the animal. See Leikola, Anto, Lokki, Juhani, Stjernberg, Torsten & Ulfvens, Johan 2004. Konstnärsbröderna von Wrights dagböcker 5: Magnus von Wright Dagbok 1863–1866. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet I Finland; Johansson, Hanna 2017, p. 206. Tieteellisiä ja kulttuurisia eläinsuhteita. Taksidermia ja kuvallisen esittämisen tekniikat suomalaisessa kuvataiteessa 1800-luvulta nykypäivään. In Näkyväksi sepitetty maa. Helsinki: SKS. Baker, Steve 2000, pp. 54–56. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books. Baker, Steve 2000, p. 8. Kaprow, Allan 1996. See Jeff Kelley (ed.). Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Groys, Boris 2002, p. 108. Art in the Age of Biopolitics. From Artwork to Art Documentation. Documenta XI, Platform 5. Catalog of an exhibition held in Kassel, Jun. 8-Sept. 15, 2002. Groys, Boris 2002, p. 110. Groys, Boris 2002, p. 114. Nisbet, James 2014, p. 3. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Cambridge Mass. & London: The MIT Press. Nisbet, James 2014, pp. 1–13. Demos, T. J. 2016, pp. 35, 38–39. As I see it system thinking became familiar in art already in the 1960s with the works of Hans Haacke, even though it continued on into the 1970s as Demos shows. With the concept of restoration of the environment Demos refers to the environmental work Time Landscape made in Manhattan by Alan Sonfist. Demos, T. J. 2016, pp. 52–62. Morton, Timothy 2010, pp. 4–5. Morton, Timothy 2010, p. 5.

2019 Didi Bozzini The Worth Of Life Our true mission in this world cannot be, under any circumstance, to turn our backs on the things and beings that we encounter and that appeal to our heart; on the contrary, it is exactly to get in touch – by the glorification of the very bond that ties us to them – with what is manifest within them as beauty. Martin Buber, The Human Way Fertility ‘Fertility’ is a word of Latin origin that derives its root from the ambiguous verb fero, which expresses various actions: to generate, to proceed, to offer, to narrate. And in fact, when speaking of fertility, one designates that very natural condition whereby the fulfilment of each among the latter is made possible. Namely, that complex, nearly miraculous interweaving of circumstances and elements through which life originates, grows, multiplies its gifts, becomes history. It is a precious word, heavy with a promise of future and abundance, forever seen as the expression of a superior value to be laid as the foundation for a rule of action, an ethic of life. Just as much as life, art is also a fruit of fertility, for it too is creation, process, offering, and narration. And if nature is the origin of life forms, art is the origin of the forms’ life. It too requires an ideal fertile ground to aid the artworks’ proliferation and determine their sense. So, ever since mankind began representing its own life by drawing plants and animals on the walls of a cave, the prime driving force of its imagination has been the very desire for fertility. To the end of propitiating fertility and celebrating it, humans sketched figures and created symbols at first, then invented gods and raised temples, and eventually conjured rituals and painted icons. And, while the artifice was moulding the environment little by little in the attempt to make it more fertile, the wonder of a perpetually creative nature gave birth to the artists’ work in just the same way. Ever since the dawn of times, art has been the privileged access door to the splendour of the world, it has fed off it and enhanced it, in a mutual relation of influence built upon the worth of fertility. Koen Vanmechelen Born in Sint-Truiden, Koen Vanmechelen is originally from Limburg, a region - located between Westphalia, Brabant and The Netherlands - that gave birth to Bruegel, Bosch, and Rubens. Also the region where, a few centuries later, Joseph Beuys came into this world. A sculptor, painter, performer, video-artist, scholar, not to mention human rights activist Vanmechelen has set the relationship between nature and culture as the joint that his work hinges on. And - throughout the course of an almost forty - years-long journey - he has run his projects for animal and vegetal hybridization alongside the diversification of figurative arts, of 262

materials and means of expression, making formal proliferation within conceptual complexity his earmark on a poetic universe that is as unique as it is unmistakable. From the first wooden sculptures in the 80’s, to the development of a vast research program aimed at the generation of new breeds of poultry, to the recent creation of an immense park called LABIOMISTA - where among great architecture and natural landscape installations, artworks,and avians of the most disparate species live together - his art is at the same time the expression of an ethic of fertility and an aesthetic of wonder. Vanmechelen’s cosmos, which revolves around the figure of the chicken as the incarnate symbol of biocultural evolution, feeds on iconographic reiterations and semantic accumulations, on metaphors and metamorphoses, theatricalities and allegories, all to originate a protean visual universe, uneven like seed-pearl: a baroque one in all respects. A universe of powerful emotional impact, trodden in all its extension as much by the energy of life as by the exuberance of the creative gesture, where the intellect’s enticement is provoked above all by the aesthetic engagement and by the visceral charm that the transfiguration of natural forms into chimeric images exacts upon the eye. For Vanmechelen conceptualises art as a practice of reinvention of nature - the code to interpret its secrets and the instrument to safeguard it. And, by the same token, he calls upon science - almost as if it were a branch of poetry - to somewhat magically turn his reveries into reality. Art and Science Everything started with the hen and the egg. An incubator on one side, a chicken coop on the other. And the intuition that – in order to transform the present into the future - the autonomy of imagination and the rules of logical-scientific thought needed to be brought together. Nurturing images with concepts, sustaining the utopia with experience. That being so, Koen Vanmechelen broke the coop where the hen was kept prisoner and, with the resulting wooden pieces, crafted a sculpture that represented the bird at liberty. In a certain sense, that half-hen-half-coop animal, captive and wild at the same time, was the first result of his hybridization processes. Then he hatched the eggs inside his incubator and started to breed poultry. He crossed different breeds from every corner of the planet and nursed the birth of increasingly more beautiful, strong, and resilient specimens - convinced of the fact that all of those lives were artworks in their own right. These two acts - which are as symbolic as they are effectual - laid the foundations for the development of an aesthetic project where artistic creation and scientific research - with different and yet synergic modalities - could reach the same ethical, poetic goal: to make the world an inhabitable place. In spite of those who would have wanted to make it merely disposable - a place where the useful could coexist with the beautiful and necessity could become the mother of freedom. Essentially, somewhere to enjoy in its beauty and richness, not by consuming its life but - on the contrary - by helping its growth with the infinite possibilities of the human intellect. It should not be forgotten that, when Vanmechelen - not yet in his twenties - began his work as an artist, environmentalist concerns and the precepts of safeguarding nature had just entered their embryonic phase. The artistic microcosm - with the exception of Beuys and few others - was debating fruitless, self-referential arguments about the avant-garde and tradition, which resulted in a vast show of many stylistic exercises that were meant to define the essence, the form and the status of post-modern art. Both science and its armed wing of technology were dedicating themselves almost solely to realizing the dream of infinite economic growth without really making sure that the latter would correspond to actual progress. The cultures of the Humanities and Science were almost poles apart, so much so that, on this subject, in his beautiful book Other People’s Trades, published in 1985, chemist-novelist Primo Levi wrote: ‘It’s an unnatural severance, unnecessary, detrimental (…). Empedocles was not aware of it, and neither were Dante, Leonardo, Galileo, Descartes, Goethe, Einstein, nor the anonymous builders of gothic cathedrals, nor Michelangelo’. Koen Vanmechelen has reacted to the zeitgeist of that time with the independence of thought that only pertains to those who are rooted deep enough into their past to resolutely become innovators. Moreover, with the foresight of those who know that - to use Roland Barthes’ words - ‘The contemporary is untimely’. Which is to say that actually living in one’s own era means being able to see the future that it will bring about - to become today’s interpreter for the language of tomorrow. As such, he undertook - well in advance - the construction of a figurative, conceptual building, the keystone of which consisted in the very problem that would be at the centre of the ideological, political, and aesthetic debate of our days, retying through his art the interrupted thread between the humanities and scientific culture. 263

Limburg Limburg is that fertile land of the mind that lies between Pieter Paul Rubens’ painting and the work of Joseph Beuys. Nomadic, heterogeneous, and rich in exotic influences as it is, Vanmechelen’s work was born, grew, and resides in this very region of art. On the 26th of November 1965, at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys’ first personal exhibition was being inaugurated. The visitors were locked outside, and could observe him through the gallery window - with his face covered in gold and honey - as he explained the paintings that were being exhibited to a dead hare he was cradling in his arms. The performance revolved around an ensemble of strongly symbolic elements. The lifeless hare, figuring the death of an animal that among the Celtic populations of Limburg traditionally represents fertility. Honey, the sweet product of a society that is as industrious and cohesive as a beehive. The golden, unmistakable emblem of the highest social value. The paintings, clear icons of art. Lastly, the artist, the medium who was to establish the bond between an audience and the symbolic objects through inaudible words - words that to them were hence secret - thus completing a ritual to revive the nexus between the world of things and the world of ideas. This vision of the shaman artist, who acts as the intercessor between nature and culture, has undoubtedly been a primary source of inspiration for Vanmechelen. His way of seeing art as a practice that can override the purely contemplative attitude and modify reality certainly owes a big debt to that seminal work of Beuys. Nonetheless, what Vanmechelen has accomplished with great originality is the passage from the field of symbols to the field of facts. By bringing art out of the galleries and the museums and into the landscape as well as into society, with people, within the daily sphere. By multiplying his participations at universities and farms throughout the years, by involving local farming communities or subverting typical food supply chains, by reinserting endangered species within the environment or regenerating the cultural life of an entire city that has been wounded by the crisis of industrial monoculturalism. Unwavering in his belief that the paths of diversity and miscellany were the ones to follow in order to bring his project to fruition, Vanmechelen has done all of this while constantly trying to wed the ideals of social justice and environmental sustainability to the search for the ever-changing beauty of forms, as much in art as in nature. But, when we talk about beauty in Limburg, our thoughts immediately turn to Rubens’ masterpieces and to his cosmos of opulent liveliness. Rubens, who celebrated the triumph of the flesh and considered the natural world in all its luxurious bountifulness as the archetype for a baroque pictorial opus, outrageous and mesmerizing. Rubens - a collector of naturalia et mirabilia - who depicted the metamorphoses like no one before, magnifying them through the lavishness of his colours and plunging them inside whirlpools of whirling compositions. Rubens and his Medusa, or the countless canvases populated by mythological creatures, centaurs, satyrs, fauns and, nymphs with exceptionally sinuous naked bodies. And then peacocks, swans, eagles, horses, dogs, boars, reptiles, and felines, painted with such artistry and so much resounding spontaneity they inspire immediate awe. And from the very admiration for this art stems Vanmechelen’s complex visual alphabet - made of taxidermies and sculptures of animal anatomy, of informal paintings and photographic portraits, of organic materials and neon, technological instruments and vital organs, of mythological figures and laboratory files, of real and fantastic. The alphabet of a language that is absolutely contemporary and ancient at the same time, which finds its own stylistically distinctive traits within the overlapping of forms and the contamination of media. A Limburger’s language, one that - between Rubens and Beuys - speaks of fertility and beauty as the inexhaustible values of life. Baroque The enlightened school of thought - according to which being and appearing could never coincide because of the antagonism between reason and sensation - led historians throughout the neo-classical period to define the art of the previous age with the negatively connoted term baroque, as a synonym of ‘misleading’, ‘sensational’, ‘ornamental’, ‘pompous’, and even ‘decaying’. Actually, nowadays, this word - apart from indicating the true artistic current within a precise historical period without any implication of quality - designates an aesthetic category that goes far beyond its understanding in the 17th and 18th century. It much more liberally defines a complex creative universe, oversized, eccentric, irregular, excessive, imaginative, bizarre, grandiose, but above all with a predilection for visual seduction and emotional transportation as the conveyors of concepts and narrative contents. It is in this sense that Vanmechelen’s work can legitimately be considered baroque art in its own right. His work originates from the aesthetic enchantment generated by natural forms,

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and tends to heighten them in order to deliver - with their transformation into figures of art - an even deeper sense of wonder, even closer - if possible - to the essence of things. Without any intent of misdirection or mere decoration, for this metamorphosis always has the makings of a search for knowledge and is always motivated by the actual will to help save our natural, social, and cultural reality. Vanmechelen simply conceives the artifice as an instrument of knowledge and applies his scientific-poetic procedure to the biocultural complexity of life, namely to the raw material of his art. To him, the notion that imagination constitutes the common source of knowledge and invention is evident; it also goes without saying that his world consequentially takes the appearance of a wunderkammer, the walls of which have widened up to the point where they coincide exactly with the borders of the world itself. Up to the point of becoming a wonderland where the lines between being and appearing are blurred, where the minuscule corresponds to the gigantic, where the archaic echoes the modern. What once seemed simple reveals itself to be infinitely complex, mutations are metaphors and concepts are expressed with allegories, in a game of reveries and revelations whereby - as Italo Calvino once wrote – ‘The eye does not see things but shapes of things that signify other things’. Vanmechelen’s universe is intrinsically baroque, in so far as the vital impetus at the core of it is an evolutional energy in perennial movement. It is constant dynamic, permanent mutation, precariousness of the state of things, uncertainty. And the beauty of the pieces that constitute it resides in the very awe of an unsteady balance, a shape in the making, an ongoing metamorphosis, a hybridization with unexpected results. This is the beauty of fecundation and fertility, something that, according to the artist himself, ‘comes from the outside’, for the work of life follows the moves of desire, that irrepressible tension towards the other than ourselves. In fact, Vanmechelen knows perfectly well that ‘All actual life is encounter’, as Martin Buber said, hence every work of art that is deserving of this definition is an expression of the feeling of otherness. The reason for his being a baroque artist lies also within this intuition. Contamination and crossover are indeed his instruments of choice, his method. The contamination of expressive means, the hybridisation of subjects. To the point of great complexity within both projects and artworks and of a generative paroxysm that is modelled after nature’s quality of perpetual creation. Something that, as within nature, makes diversification its most efficient method for developing new creatures or new creations. Just like nature, just like a baroque painting pervaded by horror vacui, i.e. the dread of empty spaces where life is impossible - something that prompts to filling, accumulation, reiteration, and even redundancy. In the end, Koen Vanmechelen’s is an art of the senses and of excess, of appearances and essence, of metaphor and mutation, of marvel and discovery, of movement and complexity, otherness and empathy, contamination and overabundance. How could anyone try to formulate a definition for it without resorting to the concept of baroque? The Worth of Life The Worth of Life is a title that juxtaposes two words of ample, composite meaning. ‘Life’, i.e. the natural phenomenon that nothing would exist without - the principle of which lies within the genetic process that the ancient Greeks used to refer to as Zoé, and is configured in the cycle of events they would sum up with the word Bios. And ‘Worth’, the idea that was conceived to establish the importance of everything, and to credit each one with a quality that would determine its position in the system of desire. It is hence a conceptual elaboration to be inscribed in the domain of culture, one the Greeks defined as Logos with regard to its theoretical plane, and as Ethos when addressing its practical side. Therefore, the expression ‘the worth of life’ indicates the encounter between nature and culture, being and acting, biological reality and ethical thought. This comes with a nearly inexhaustible number of scientific, historical, aesthetic, and moral implications. Too many - some might say perhaps - for an exhibition of artworks, to the point where this title could even seem pretentious. However, with its peculiar ability to reconcile sense and sensibility within a single image - what belongs to the body and what belongs to the mind, things and ideas, instants and history - it is in the very nature of art to make this a plausible choice. And even more so the nature of Koen Vanmechelen’s art. By constantly producing the synthesis of these dichotomies through a progress along the dynamic balance between knowledge and imagination, between the soul and the beast, the beautiful and the righteous, he makes of his every piece an attempt to recreate the complexity of life - to exalt its qualities and celebrate its value.

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In this same manner, the audience of The Worth of Life can find themselves before the hands of a giant giving out diamonds and protecting a hatchling, as well as flick through an imposing volume containing the infinite sequence of numbers and letters that traces the genome of a chicken. They can lose themselves in the bright colors of informal painting and give in to the mythological remembrances summoned up by Medusa’s marble head. They can skirt along a ripening cornfield, or be surprised by the sight of an iguana strolling on a carpet of peacock feathers. They can go through a gallery of photographic portraits of birds - never before seen in such an intense presence - and reflect upon the evolution of the species in front of the giant dinosaur claw - which is nothing other than an exaggerated enhancement of a chicken’s foot. Observe with the unknowing wonderment of a child’s eyes while the egg hatches in the warmth of an incubator, or try to solve the enigma that is a monkey with the head of a nightjar. These are all images that speak of natural phenomena and ethical choices simultaneously. They speak of origin and destination, freedom and captivity, identity and diversity, transformation and survival, destruction and creation. They tell of art, and remind us how it cannot be confined inside the cage of style, of categories, of brands and fashions. They speak of a remote era, hardly even fathomable, when nature was the whole of all things, and divulge our days, which are riddled with the dread that nature might not be anything anymore. They tell us the story of an artist and a man who is viscerally bound to life, as the matter of his opus and the fabric of everyone’s story. And this is ultimately the most meaningful characteristic of Koen Vanmechelen’s work: the fact of conceiving art as an act of empathy, a gesture of compliance with life that can evoke ‘symbolic sympathy’ (as Theodor Lipps wrote), and is capable of creating solidarity, of generating connections and rousing the sense of community. In the end, what other ambition should an artist entertain if not that of making clear how art’s goal is to reveal the worth of life to all? English translation by Léon Bozzini

KOEN VANMECHELEN CURRICULUM VITAE

Koen Vanmechelen was born on August 26th 1965 in Sint-Truiden (Belgium) Honors and Awards (selection) •

Social Impact Award, Tulum (MX), 2019 Best Concept, VENUEZ, Cosmocafe, 2018 • BGTW Award, ComingWorldRememberMe, London (UK), 2017 Excellent Poster Award, ISAG Conference, Utah (US), 2016• Golden Nica Hybrid Art, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz (AT), 2013 • Best Artwork Award, ISMB/ECCB, Berlin (DE), 2013 • Pavilion 0 Global Artist’s Award, Venice (IT), 2013 • Doctor Honoris Causa UHasselt, Hasselt (BE), 2010 • Honorary citizenship Sint-Truiden (BE), 2005 • Gustav-Henemann-Friedenspreis (with Gregie de Maeyer for ‘Juul’), Berlin (DE), 1998 • Premi internacional Catalunya d’illustration (with Gregie de Maeyer for ‘Juul’), Barcelona (ES) • Eulen des Monats (Bulletin Jugend und Literatur Alemania) (with Gregie de Maeyer for ‘Juul’) Hamburg (DE), 1997 Exhibitions Solo-exhibitions (selection) 2021 Golden Cord – Knokke (BE) 2020 Do Not Argue - D.N.A., Durbuy (BE) 2019 • • • • •

The Worth of Life, Teatro dell’architettura, Mendrisio (CH) Golden Cord, Linda & Guy Pieters Foundation, Saint-Tropez (FR) Paintings, Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke (BE) Human Rights Pavilion, Venice (IT) Art Salon, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Once in a Lifetime, Vienna (AT)

2018 • • •

It’s About Time, Serlachius Museum, Mäntta (FI) ComingWorldRememberMe, Ypres (BE) Incubated Worlds (permanent installation), Addis Ababa (ET)

2017 • • •

ETHIOPIA, CosmOpolitan Gallery, Genk (BE) Protected Paradise, Palazzo Franchetti, La Biennale di Venezia (IT) Vision of the Owl, galerie valérie Bach, Brussels (BE)

2016 • • • • •

AWAKENER, Wilford X, Temse (BE) ENERGY/MASS, Wasserman Projects, Detroit (US) Planetary Community Chicken, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (ZW) Diversity, CosmOpolitan Gallery, Genk (BE) Fables & Fantasies, GUY PIETERS GALLERY, Knokke (BE)

2015 • • •

This Is Not a Chicken, Het Domein, Sittard (NL) LIFEBANK/AWAKENER, GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA, 56th Biennial of Venice (IT) Myths & Medicine, Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke (BE)

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• • • • • •

Darwin’s Dream, The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church, London (UK) Never Green - C.C.P., Rurart, Poitiers (FR) La Génération Noble - C.C.P., Château de Chimay, Chimay (BE) Signature - C.C.P., Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke (BE) COMBAT - CWXRM, Bommenvrij, Nieuwpoort (BE) The Pied Chapel, Old Church of Vichte, Vichte (BE)

2013 • • • • • •

Inception - C.C.P., Wasserman Projects, Detroit (US) Leaving Paradise, CONNERSMITH, Washington (US) The Mechelse Styrian - 17th generation - C.C.P., Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana (SI) Amphitheatrum - C.C.P., Cosmopolitan Gallery, Genk (BE) De Wachtkamer, Schatten van VLIEG, Kruidtuin Leuven (BE) Handmade - C.C.P., LOMAK, Tessenderlo (BE)

2012 • COMBAT, Landcommandery Alden Biesen, Bilzen (BE) and Art gallery De Mijlpaal, Heusden-Zolder (BE) • Hotel de Inmigrantes 2 – Cosmopolitan Stranger (Collateral Event Manifesta 9), Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (BE) 2011 • • • • •

Nato a Venezia, Collateral Event of 54th Biennial of Venice, Venice (IT) Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Art Labor, Shanghai (CN) Breaking the Cage, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art Eupen, Eupen (BE) C.C.P. – In-vetro, Mediaruimte, Brussels (BE) King’s Crown – C.C.P., Absolute Art Gallery, Knokke (BE)

• Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Musée Départemental de l’ Abbaye de St. Riquier, Saint-Antoine-l’Abbaye (FR), 2003 • Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Desire, De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (NL), 2003 • Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Mechelse Owlbeard, GEM Den Haag / KunstRAI, curator Wim Van Krimpen, Amsterdam (NL), 2003 • Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Second Generation: Mechelse Bresse – Sex & Mortality, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE), 2003 • Visible / Invisible, Galerie Tapper, Malmö (SE), 2003 • Artificial Cross-breeding, Berengo Fine Arts, Miami Art Fair (US), 2002 • Who’s Calling, Berengo Fine Arts, Mi Art, Milan (IT), 2002 • Smak, smak, The Mechelse Bresse, S.M.A.K., curator Jan Hoet Jr., Ghent (BE), 2002 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE), 2001 • Performance Blood & Colours, Filmfestival, Venice (IT), 2000 Group exhibitions (selection) 2021 Glasstress Boca Raton 2021, Miami (US) Verbinding, Rasa – Traveling exhibition (BE) Glasstress, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (RU) Shamanism, Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea, Milan (IT) Curator of Patchwork, Watou (BE) A Soft Gentle Breeze, Villa Les Zéphrys, Westende (BE) The Jerusalem Biennale (IL) 2020 Biennial of Poznan - Events Horizon (PL) TOUCH ME Festival, Biennial of Zagreb (CR) Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit, global Beestig?, Stadsfestival Damme (BE) 2010-2020: 10 ans Musée de Flandre, Cassel (FR) A century of wonder. Knowledge in the 16th century, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerpen (BE) Mirrors of Time, Kasteel Oud-Rekem (BE) International Photo Exhibition, Turkmenistan Curator of Unbreakable, Women in Glass, Murano (IT)

2010 • 14th Generation - Mechelse Silky, Himalayas Center, Pudong Shanghai (CN) • Cosmopolitan Chicken – Diversity, Espace Européen pour la Sculpture, Parc Tournay-Solvay, Brussels (BE) 2009 • • • • •

Unicorn, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, Venice (IT) Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Conner Contemporary Art, Washington DC (US) Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam (NL) Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Orloff, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE) Connection, St. Lucas Gallery, Brussels (BE)

2008 • Breaking the Cage – The art of Koen Vanmechelen, Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts & Business, curator Mike Phillips, London (GB) • The Chicken’s Appeal, Museum Valkenhof, curator Frank Van der Schoor, Nijmegen (NL) • CCP Ten Generations, Galerie k4, Münnich (DE) 2007 • • •

The Accident, Cornice, Venice Projects, Venice (IT) CCP Ten Generations, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE) CCP Au Salon, Marijke Schreurs Gallery, Brussels (BE)

2006 •

The Accident, curator Agnes Husslein, Palm Court, Miami Beach (US)

2005 - 2000 • Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Virtual Mechelse Fighters, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem (BE), 2005 • Red Jungle Fowl - Genus XY, CRAC, curator Hilde Teerlinck, Altkirch (FR), 2005 • Red Jungle Fowl - Genus XY, Z33, curator Jan Boelen, Hasselt (BE), 2004 • Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Bourbourg (FR), 2004 • Mechelse Dresdner, Galerie k4, München (DE), 2004 270

2019 • • • • • •

FOOD; Bigger than the plate, V&A, London (UK) Iconic works, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE), Ateneum, Helsinki (FI) Between Jungle and civilization, BRAFA, Guy PIeters Gallery, Brussels (BE) ART with me Tulum (ME) Creatures Made to Measure, Designmuseum Gent (BE), Marta Herford (DE) LABIOMISTA, I Love Science Festival, Bozar (BE)

2018 • • • • • •

GLASSTRESS PTUJ Slovenija Imago Mundi, Join the Dots, Trieste (IT) New Worlds: Art between Museum and Laboratory, Villa Rot, Burgrieden (DE) COQ, MuséoParc Alésia, Musée et Parc Buffon (FR) Il TERZO GIORNO, curator Didi Bozzini, Parma (IT) Open Codes, ZKM, Karlsruhe (DE)

2017 • • • • • • •

GLASSTRESS, Boca Raton, Miami (US) Ecovention Europe, De Domijnen, Sittard (NL) Force of Nature, The Art Pavilion, Mile End Park, London, (UK) Summer in the city, La Patinoire Royal, Brussels (BE) Celibataire Divas, Refugehuis Hasselt (BE) XY - 10 Years Glazen Huis, Lommel (BE) Planetary Community Chicken, VII Socle du Monde, HEART, Herning, Denmark (DK)

271

• • • •

Beauty of the Beast, Kasteel d’Ursel, Hingene (BE) How on Earth should this be art?, Concordia, Enschede (NL) Between Heaven and Earth II - A tribute to Willy Van den Bussche, Brugge (BE) Hair and Feathers, Musée de Flandre, Cassel (FR)

2016 • • • •

AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, DordtYart, Dordrecht (NL) Haute-à-Porter, Modemuseum Hasselt (BE) Daydreaming With... Stanley Kubrick, Sommerset House, London (UK) LUCY BOAR, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven (NL)

2015 •

Evolution of a Hybrid - CC®P, The Importance of Being..., Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana (CU), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (AR), Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (BR) • Protected Paradise - C.C.P., Vienna for Art’s Sake, Winterpalais Prinz Eugen, Belvedere, Vienna (AT) • New Brood - C.C.P., Höhenrausch, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz (AT) • Under Pressure - C.C.P., Proportio, 56th Biennial of Venice, Palazzo Fortuni (IT) • Unicorn, Pro-Historic - C.C.P., Belgi. Barbi e Poeti, Musée d’Art Contemporain de la ville de Rome (IT) • Arena de Evolución, 12th la Bienal de La Habana (CU) • Cosmopolitan Chicken Kunde - C.C.P., Suriname Biennial, Moengo (SR) • Mechelse Cemani - CCP19, Human Parallels, 6th Hotel de Inmigrantes, Jogja Biennale (ID) • La Biomista, Exo-Evolution, Globale 2015, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien-technologie, Karlsruhe (DE) 2014 • In Captivity, Genius Loci – Spirit of Place, Lisson Gallery & Berengo Studio, 55th International Architecture Biennale of Venice (IT) • La Biomista, The Green Light District, BUDA, Kortrijk (BE) • In Captivity, Glasstress Istanbul, Istanbul (TR) • Mechelse Sulmtaler - CCP18, Rasa (touring expo), Belgium • Out-breeding – C.C.P., Bloed, Artisit, Landcommandery Alden-Biesen, Bilzen (BE) • Symbiosis – C.C.P., Next Door, Living Tomorrow, Vilvoorde (BE) • Symbiosis - C.C.P., Facial Make-Over, Brussels (BE) • Breaking the Cage - C.C.P., A touch of Steel, Klingenmuseum, Solingen (DE) • Bio-Care, An evening of Art and Science, Michigan, Detroit (USA) • Sex and Mortality - C.C.P., Capita Selecta, Kortrijk (BE) • Beyond Reality, CosmOpolitan Gallery, Genk (BE) • In-Vetro – C.C.P., Museum to Scale 1/7, The Baker Museum, Naples, Florida (USA) • Carried by Generations, CONNERSMITH., Washington D.C. (USA) • Pyramid of Time/Pyramid of Brains – C.C.P., The Senate and The Big hall of the National Bank of Belgium, curated by Sven Vanderstichelen, Brussels (BE) • In-Vetro – C.C.P. , Museum to Scale 1/7, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (BE) • Under my Skin - C.C.P., 25 years Museum of Fashion, Museum of Fashion, Hasselt (BE) • Mechelse Senegal - CCP16, Art for Air, Bernaert Auction House, Antwerp (BE) • Carried by Generations, Resonance(s)/Weerklank(en), Brussels (BE) 2013 • Leaving Paradise, Art Sanya, Hainan Island (CN) • Medusa – C.C.P., Wunderkammer, Academia Belgica, Rome (IT) • Under my Skin – C.C.P., Glasstress, Wallace Collection and London School of Fashion, London (UK) • CC®P – The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Cyberarts Festival, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz (AT) • Evolution of a Hybrid, BEAF13, Bozar, Brussels (BE) • Note Book, Beit Ha’ir, Tel Aviv (IL) • Some Make-Some Take – C.C.P., Hotel de Inmigrantes 3, Kunsthalle Faust, 272

Hannover (DE) • Evolution of a Hybrid, Pavilion 0, Palazzo Donà, Biennial of Venice (IT) • Under my Skin and Patience - C.C.P., White light/White Heat, Glasstress, Biennial of Venice (IT) • New Generation - C.C.P., Belgian Embassy (curated by Z33), The Hague (NL) • Protected Paradise, Guy Pieters Gallery, Saint Paul de Vence (FR) • Spawn - C.C.P., Murano >< Merano, Glasstress, MERANO ARTE (IT) • Cosmopolitan Fossil, The Eggcord and In Transit - C.C.P., Kunstenfestival Watou (BE) • Inzicht and Coming World - C.C.P., Artzuid, Amsterdam (NL) • Modified Spaces - C.C.P., (Re)source, Beelden op de Berg, Wageningen (NL) • Frantic – C.C.P., The exposition Vrouwenkuren, IPSOC and Dr. Ghislain, Kortrijk (BE) • Pro-Historic, ART COLOGNE 2013, Cologne (DE) • BRAFA 2013, Tour&Taxis, Brussel (BE) • Pedigree - C.C.P. and Hybridity in Art & Science – C.C.P., Cultural Freedom in Europe,EESC (European Economic and Social Committee), Brussels (BE) • Hybridity in Art and Science - C.C.P. and Symbiosis - C.C.P., Lieux Communs, Walloon Parliament, Namur (BE) 2012 • Hybridity in art and science – C.C.P., dOCUMENTA 13 (‘The Worldly House’), Kassel (DE) • Instead of sleeping, Glasstress Beirut, Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut (LBN) • Hotel de Inmigrantes – Cosmopolitan Stranger, Open University of Diversity, (Collateral event Manifesta 9) Hasselt (BE) • Entwined - C.C.P., Breaking the Mold, Glasstress, MADmuseum, New York (US) • Disabled – C.C.P., SCOPE NY, New York (US) • In Transit – C.C.P., ManifestAanwezig, Kasteel d’Aspremont-Lynden, (Collateral Event Manifesta 9) Oud-Rekem (BE) • Without Time Frame, Parallel Worlds, CIAP, Hasselt (Collateral Event Manifesta 9) (BE) Under Pressure – C.C.P., Leaving for a Living, ArtAndAdvice, (Collateral Event Manifesta 9) Hasselt (BE) • Coming World – C.C.P., Kunstenfestival Watou, Watou (BE) • Inzicht – C.C.P., Communicating Vessels – C.C.P., KANAL – Ondernemen is een kunst, Roeselare (BE) • Vesta – C.C.P., Lieux-Communs, Namen (BE) 2011 • Modified Spaces – C.C.P., 4th triennial of Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art (CN) • Genetic Freedom – C.C.P., Scenarios about Europe, GFZK, Leipzig (DE) • Glasstress, Venice Projects, Venice (IT), Oslo (NO) 2010 • Mediations Biennial Beyond Mediations, Tower of Babel, Poznan (PL) • Schone Schijn, Beeldende kunstmanifestatie, Heemskerk (NL) • InGewikkeld, Art Gallery De Mijlpaal, Clarissenklooster, Hasselt (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Feed the world, Wijheizijweihij, Vredeseilanden, Eliksem (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Innovations and adaptation, Dak’Art Biennial, Dakar (SN) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken – Frozen Culture Balance, Mediations, National Museum Warsaw, Warsaw (PL) • Art Amsterdam, Amsterdam (NL) • Art Paris, Paris (FR) • Arco Madrid, Madrid (ES) • The Armory Show, New York (US) • Parallellepipeda, Museum M, Leuven (BE) • FADA Los Angeles Art Show 2010, Los Angeles (US) • (Ant)arcticmatters, Frozen Culture Balance, Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke (BE) 2009 273

•

Against Exclusions, The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Mechelse Orloff, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, curator Jean-Hubert Martin, Moscow (RU) • PULSE Miami 2009, The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Pulse (US) • Glasstress, 53th Biennial of Venice, Venice (IT) • The Toronto International Art Fair 2009, Toronto (CA) • Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming ..., Völkerkundemuseum von Portheim-Stiftung, Heidelberg (DE) • In Bed Together, Breaking the Cage, Royal/T, curator Jane Glassman, Culver City (US) • VOLTA Basel 2009, Basel (CH) • CIGE 2009, China International Gallery Exposition, Beijing (CN) • Superstories, 2nd Triënnale Hasselt, curator Koos Flinterman, Hasselt (BE) 2008 • Genesis: CCP 10 Generation, Zentrum Paul Klee, curator Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Bern (CH) • The Cathedral – Ectoplasma – CCP, Congress Centre, Davos (CH) • Zerbrechliche Schönheit, The Accident, museum Kunst Palest, curator Thijs Visser, Düsseldorf (DE) • Ad Absurdum, Mechelse Bresse, MARTA, curator Jan Hoet, Herford (DE) • Die Hände der Kunst, Koen Vanmechelen x Mechelse Koekoek, MARTA, curator Jan Hoet, Herford (DE) • Ephermeral Fringes, CCP Mechelse Cubalaya, curator Filip Luyckx, Art Brussels, Brussels (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken: 10 Generations, Mediations Biennial, curators Yu Yeon Kim, Lorand Hegy, Gu Zhenqing, Poznan (PL) • Betrekkelijk Rustig, Lab, Kasteel Rekem, curator Annemie Van Laethem, Rekem (BE) • Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, CCP, curator Arno Vroonen, München (DE) 2007 • Totemisimi, Medusa, National Gallery of London, London (GB) • Genesis - The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Centraal Museum Utrecht, curator Emilie Gomart, Utrecht (NL) • De Kunstkas, Bio, Verbeke Foudation, Kemzeke (BE) • Some make – Some take, Art Köln, Keulen (DE) 2006 • Facing 1200° - Glass from the Berengo Collection, Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Klagenfurt (AT) • Handle with care, Pushkin Museum, Moscow (RU) • DOTS, curator Stef Vanbellingen, Sint-Niklaas (BE) 2005 - 2000 • Super! curator Edith Doove, Hasselt (BE), 2005 • Two Asias, Two Europes, Duolun Museum of Modern Art, curator Gu Zhenqing, Shanghai (CN), 2005 • Cultivando la Naturaleza, Fundacion César Manrique, curator Bianca Visser, Lanzarote (ES), 2004 • ECLIPS / 25th Birthday Deweer Art Gallery, curator Jo Coucke, Transfo Zwevegem (BE), 2004 • Le Coq, Musée Départementale de l’Abbeye de Saint-Riquier, Picardie (FR), 2003 • Beaufort 2003, curator Willy Van den Bussche, Blankenberge (BE), 2003 • Cinecittà, Berengo Fine Arts, Filmfestival, Venice (IT), 2003 • The Walking Egg, Shinchu Museum, Taipei (TW), 2003 • 3 FEB 02, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, curator Edith Doove, Deurle (BE), 2002 • Attitude, Château du Pauly (FR), 2002 • Cinecittà, Berengo Fine Arts Filmfestival, Venice (IT), 2002 • Secret Gardens, curator Annemie Van Laethem, Rekem (BE), 2001 • www.murano.be, Venetiaanse Gaanderijen, Oostende (BE), 2001 • Wir sind die ander(en), curator Jan Hoet, Herford (DE), 2001 • The Walking Egg, Arco 2000, Madrid (ES), 2000 • Storm Centers, curator Jan Hoet, Watou (BE), 2000 • A Shot in the Head, curator Jill Silverman, Lisson Gallery, London (GB), 2000 274

Permanent Works (selection) CCP/PCC, Sint-Truiden (BE), 2021 PROOVO, private collector (BE), 2021 Human Rights Pavilion Tulum (MX), 2019 LABIOMISTA, Genk (BE), 2019 T-REX, Mäntta (FI), 2019 Cosmogolem, LABIOMISTA - Studio Koen Vanmechelen, Genk (Be), 2018 Medusa, Serlachius Museums (FI), 2018 Book of Genomes, National Museum of Ethiopia, 2018 Incubated Worlds, ILRI, Addis Ababa (ET), 2018 De Kus, Sint-Truiden (BE), 2018 Collective Memory, EIUC, Global campus of Human Rights, Venice (IT), 2017 Cosmogolem, drawing, National Gallery of Harare (ZW), 2016 Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, ZKM, Karlsruhe (DE) Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, dOCUMENTA, 2012 Under Pressure - Luciano Benetton Collection, 2015 Infinity - C.C.P., Dronten (NL), 2016 Infinity - C.C.P., Sint-Trudo Hospital, Sint-Truiden (BE), 2013 Modified Spaces, T-Rex, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (CN), 2011 The Cosmopolitan Chicken – Celestial body, VOKA Kamer van Koophandel Limburg, Hasselt (BE), 2010 The Cosmopolitan Chicken – Time Temperature, BioVille, Campus UHasselt, Biomedical Research Institute (BIOMED), Diepenbeek (BE), 2010 High-Breed, The European Academy of Gynaecological Surgery, Leuven (BE), 2009 Troubleyn / Laboratorium, Ab Ovo, Antwerp (BE), 2007 The Walking Egg – Born, Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg, Genk (BE), 2005 Drawing, GEM | Museum voor actuele kunst, 2003

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Lectures/debates (selection) 2021 National Academy of Arts, Sofia Pecha Kucha, Unbore Collective Online Global Campus of Human Rights Conversations, Venice (IT) UNESCO forum, Venice (IT) 2020 MEET Digital Culture Center, Milan (IT) Mindblowers, VUB x KVS, Brussels (BE) Intersect Chicago/SOFA (US) Gender debate, ESF Vlaanderen The Ultimate Crack, China 2019 New Current, Rotterdam (NL)• Xfestival, UHasselt (BE) Food & talk seminar, Foodcamp Finland, Helsinki (FI) Opening Ceremony, ESGE, Thessaloniki (GR) Human Rights week, Salzburg (AT) Human Rights Pavilion, OPUS, Mapuche (CL) Human Rights Pavilion, OPUS, Nomade, Tulum (ME)

• • • • •

2018 • Confused, LABIOMISTA (BE) • It’s About Time, University of the Arts, Helsinki (FI) • A night with Koen Vanmechelen and Tom Lanoye, LABIOMISTA (BE) • Fertility, Art Festival Ptuj (SI) • Art as Human Rights, Graduation Ceremony, Global Campus Human Rights, Venice (IT)

275

• All Rights! Let’s talk about the Future of Humanity, Amnesty International, Brussels (BE) • Night of ICT, Proximus, KANAL, Brussels (BE) • Food Art Film Festival, Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (NL) 2017 • • • •

Tedx, Univeristy of Michigan (US) This is not a chicken, Design Indaba (SA) Collective Memory, Diplomatic councel on human Rights, EIUC, Venice (IT) Mindgate, Museum M, Leuven (BE)

2016 • VLIR-UOS, The Chicken’s Appeal, Tour & Taxis, Brussels (BE) • The Chicken’s Appeal, International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi (KE) • XIII International Forum, Sculpture Network, Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke (BE) • Duo lecture with Maarten Doorman on the social relevance of art, DordtYart, Dordrecht (NL) • Otlet Salon, Koen Vanmechelen edition, Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (BE) 2015 • The Chicken’s Appeal, Good Practices Workshop # 5, University of Hasselt (BE) • This is Not a Chicken, Het Domein, Sittard (NL) 2014 • The Chicken’s Appeal, Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (on invitation of Prof. Dr. Anton Zeilinger, Vienna (AT) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Loitering with Intent, Stockholm University of the Arts, Stockholm (SE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, New Narratives for Europe, Berlin (DE) • Arena de Evolución, Feest van de Filosofie, University of Leuven, Leuven (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project, Visualizing Biological Data Conference, Heidelberg (DE) 2013 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, New Narratives for Europe, Milan (IT) • Evolution of a Hybrid, Poultry Genetics Symposium, Venice (IT) • This is not a chicken, Leuphana University, Lüneburg (DE) • Evolution of a Hybrid, Hybrid Marketing, STIMA, Ghent (BE) • Hybridity in Art and Science, Auslandskulturtagung, Vienna (AT) • This is not a chicken, Prix Forum Golden Nica, Linz (AT) • Evolution of a Hybrid, A Vision of the Future, Pavilion 0, Biennial of Venice (IT) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte), Havana (CU) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, CONNERSMITH, Washington (US) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana (SI) • When happiness happens, BOZAR (in cooperation with United Nations), Brussels (BE) • The Cosmogolem Foundation, JOC De Kouter, Poperinge (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Het Paleis, Antwerp (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, EuropeN, EESC (European Economic and Social Committee), Brussels (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Cranbrook University, Detroit (US) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Wayne State University, School of Medicine, Detroit (US) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (US) 2012 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Tori Oso (SR) • The Open University of Diversity, Z33, Hasselt (BE) • The Open University of Diversity, TEDxYouth Flanders, Antwerp (BE) • The Open Univeristy of Diversity, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing (CN) • This is not a Chicken, World Appreciative Inquiry Conference, Ghent (BE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Genetic Freedom, Europe (to the power of N), Berlin (DE) • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Bioethics Congress, Rotterdam (NL) 276

• •

The Walking egg, Unite for Sight Global Health & Innovation, Yale University (US) Artist talk met Marcel Pinas, VUB university, Brussels (BE)

2011 • This is not a chicken, Galerie Für Zeit Genössische Kunst, Leipzig (DE) • Modified Spaces –C.C.P., with Peter Noever, Guanzhou Museum of Art, Guangzhou (CN) • In-Vetro – C.C.P., Symposium Transparent vision – the art and science of glass Kijkduin Biënnale (NL) • The Open University of Diversity, Creativity World Forum, Hasselt (BE) • The Chicken’s Appeal, Pecha kucha, Brussels (BE) 2010 - 2002 • The Chicken’s Appeal, TedxFlanders, Antwerp (BE), 2010 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, European Conference On Computational Biology, Ghent (BE), 2010 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Belgian pavilion World Expo, Shanghai (CN), 2010 • Arts meets Science, Doctor Honoris Causa, Faculty of Medicine UHasselt, Hasselt (BE), 2010 • The Accident, Debate with Professor J.-J. Cassiman, Dr. Mike Philips, Dr. Luc Vrielinck, and Peter Adriaenssens, moderator: Indra Dewitte, Museum M, Leuven (BE), 2010 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, PULSE New York (US), 2010 • The Chicken’s Appeal, 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow (RU), 2009 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, 53e Biennial di Venezia, Venice (IT), 2009 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Culture and Nature Balance Climat Change Congress, 2009, Kopenhagen (DK), 2009 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Debate, World Economic Forum, Davos (CH), 2008 • Day of Hope, Cosmogolem, Jeanne Devos Fonds, Mumbai (IN), 2008 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK), 2008 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Creativity World Forum, Lotto Arena, Antwerp (BE), 2008 • The Walking Egg, Expert meeting Fertility in Developing Countries, Arusha (TA), 2007 • CosmoGolem, Child abuse: Neglecting the Facts, Leuven (BE), 2005 • CosmoGolem en Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, The Jacobs Foundation, Zurich (CH), 2004 • The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Natural History Museum, London (GB), 2002 Articles (selection) •

Vanmechelen, K. (2009) “Facts, Views & Vision, The Low Countries Journal of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Reproductive Health”, A scientific Journal of the Flemish Society of Obstetrics & Gynaecology. Vanmechelen, K. (2008) “IVF in developing countries: an artist’s view”, Human Reproduction, An Oxford Journal (in association with Eshre Special Task Force on Developing Countries and Infertility). Art meets science: The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project, A. STINCKENS, A. VEREIJKEN, E. ONS, P. KONINGS, P. VAN AS, H. CUPPENS, Y. MOREAU, R. SAKAI, J. AERTS, B. GODDEERIS, N. BUYS, K. VANMECHELEN, J.J. CASSIMAN

• •

Publications (selection) Linda & Guy Pieters, Golden Cord, 2021 This is Not a Chicken, Vanmechelen K. & Magiels G., LannooCampus, 2020 The Worth of Life, Didi Bozzini, Mario Botta, James Putnam, Marcus Thelen, Pierluigi Panza, 2019, Mendrisio Academy Press/Silvana Editoriale Vanmechelen, K (ed.) 2019, LABIOMISTA Journal II Foundation Linda and Guy Pieters, The Elements of Life Fire - Earth - Water - Oxygen, 2019 •

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It’s About Time, Timo Valjakka (ed.), Rod Mengham, Hanna Johansson, Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, 2018, Parvs • Het Belang van Limburg & Vanmechelen, K (eds.) 2016, Het belang van Cultuur • Vanmechelen, K (ed.) 2015, AWAKENER/LIFEBANK, La Biennale di Venezia. • Vanmechelen, K (ed.) 2015, La Biomista Journal. • Vanmechelen, K (ed.) 2014, Darwin’s Dream, St Pancras Church, London. • Guy Pieters Editions & Vanmechelen, K. (eds.) 2012, COMBAT, Lancommandery Alden Biesen, Bilzen. • Vanmechelen, K. (ed.) 2013, The Accident VI, Chronicles of The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Hasselt. • Vanmechelen, K. (ed.) 2011, The Accident III, Chronicles of The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Guangzhou. • Vanmechelen, K. (ed.) 2010, The Accident II, Chronicles of The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Hasselt. • Museum Het Valkhof & Vanmechelen, K. (eds.) 2008, The Chicken’s Appeal, Nijmegen. • Het Glazen Huis & Vanmechelen, K. (ed.) 2007, The Accident, Lommel. • Verbeke Foundation & Vanmechelen, K. (eds.) 2007, The Accident, Chronicles of The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Kemzeke. • Dupont, P. (ed) 2005, The Walking Egg/Born – Fertility Hospital, Genk. • Deweer Art Gallery & Vanmechelen K. (eds.) 2005, The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Virtual Mechelse Fighter, Otegem. • Simons, B. & Keirse W. (eds.) 2003, Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Ludion Gent-Amsterdam – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam. • Deweer Art Gallery & Vanmechelen K. (eds.) 2003, The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Sex & Mortality, Otegem. • Deweer Art Gallery & Vanmechelen K. (eds.) 2001, The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Between Natural breeding and genetic engineering, Otegem. De Maeyer, G. Labarque P., Vanmechelen, K., 1998. Manneke van Glas. Averbode: Uitgeverij Altiora. • De Maeyer, G., & Vanmechelen, K., 1997. De Kooi. Averbode: Uitgeverij Altiora. • De Maeyer, G., & Vanmechelen, K., 1996. Juul. Averbode: Uitgeverij Altiora.

MECC (Mushroom, Egg, Chicken, Camelids); Koen Vanmechelen’s search for more resilient and sustainable models is not restricted to crossbreeding. The innovative project MECC (which started at the 56th Biennial of Venice) focuses on the interconnectivity of species. It presumes that man is part of a planetary superorganism and proposes that art can be a bridge between species. Its main query: can the powerful antibodies of the camelids be introduced into humans, without crossing? Mushroom, Egg, Chicken, Camelid are four different organisms which Vanmechelen brings together in a circular model in an attempt to challenge the boundaries between them. Cosmocafe; In 2017 artist Koen Vanmechelen, in collaboration with local entrepreneurs, created a café as a continuously evolving living art work. A 19-century building on the Groenmarkt of Sint-Truiden, where in January 2016 the first Planetary Community Chicken project saw the light of day, now houses ‘the staminee of the future’. The cosmocafé illustrates the need for diversity and multiculturalism through the work of Vanmechelen. As a visitor, you literally become a part of his art through the “art of food/ food of art concept”. Human Rights Pavilion; During the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Koen Vanmechelen heralded the birth of the Human Rights Pavilion, an evolving artwork that takes shape roaming the planet through contact with persons and organisations involved with or interested in human rights. At all locations, encounters and conversations will be encouraged via so-called SoTO (Survival of The Other) dialogues in Cosmocafes. The project came about in collaboration with international partners: the Global Campus of Human Rights, Fondazione Berengo and the MOUTH Foundation. Incubated Worlds; The Incubated Worlds installation was inaugurated on April 26, 2018 at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Ethiopia. The installation integrates both living and visual artworks into scientific research and offers a new paradigm between art, science and social engagement. Incubated Worlds is a collaboration between ILRI’s African Chicken Genetics Gains (ACGG) project in Addis Ababa and Koen Vanmechelen in which ACGG-selected chicken breeds are crossed with various chickens from the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. The aim is the creation of a divers flock of Planetary Community Chickens that are both sustainable and productive and that will thrive in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Evolving Art Projects & Foundations

LABIOMISTA; With space for alpacas and art, wilderness and wonder, artist Koen Vanmechelen built a sanctuary for creativity and creatures in Belgium. LABIOMISTA is a 24 hectare evolving work of art celebrating the mix of life. Erected on the foundation of the mining past, LABIOMISTA invites, challenges and inspires you to think about the current society, and the society of the future. A belief in art as oxygen for life. A plea for diversity as the basis for all evolution.

COSMOPOLITAN CHICKEN PROJECT; is an artistic crossbreeding project with iconic chicken breeds from all over the world. Started in 1999, it has evolved into a metaphorical, global narrative with offshoots into philosophy, science, medicine and sociology. PLANETARY COMMUNITY CHICKEN; the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project has resulted in new strains with remarkable increased potential for gene transcription and expression. This chicken is now introduced into communities around the world and crossed with local commercial chickens: an injection of global diversity, a recognition of local heritage and the initiation of small-scale development projects.

LaVieBreede; Based on the vision and philosophy of LABIOMISTA, Koen Vanmechelen initiated ‘LaVieBreede’: a master plan that continues his philosophy on diversity at a higher city level. LaVieBreede proposes a sustainable and dynamic ecosystem that encloses and connects the north of Genk. This master plan connects the local community with the visitor, the city with agriculture and nature, art with science, industry with knowledge.

SOTWA – meaning umbilical cord – started in 2014 when Koen Vanmechelen visited the Maasai tribe in Arusha as part of his Library of Collected Knowledge project for the Biennial of Havana. With SOTWA, the artist explores the benefit of crossbreeding between cattle stock in Africa, where globalization and intense livestock farming increasingly threatens the tribe’s traditional cattle herding.

LaMouseion; During the 2020 worldwide pandemic, Vanmechelen launched a unique future driven project; LaMouseoin. LaMouseion, a reference to the legendary knowledge and arts institution Mouseion of Alexandria, is aimed explicitly at young people. In three knowledge containers at LABIOMISTA they are invited to think about the future. Just like in ancient Greece, LaMouseion brings together free spirits in their tireless quest for answers, knowledge and wisdom. A new locus for experiments at the crossroads of nature and culture.

LUCY, a pig named after our most iconic ancestor in Ethiopia, is a unique animal, a mythical creature who mixes her wild genes with those of other species of pig. The project LUCY focuses on biodiversity and transparency in the food chain. Its full name, LUCY - Peel Petuum Mobile, refers to the endless process of crossbreeding as an eternal movement of time and place. LUCY was realised in collaboration with the Dutch pig farmers of Heyde Hoeve as part of the FoodLabPeel project, which searches for new perspectives in agriculture and livestock farming.

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OpUnDi; the Open University of Diversity, is Koen Vanmechelen’s constantly mutating and migrating hotbed of ideas. Founded in 2011, it’s an intellectual crossroads, a bank of ideas and a meeting place for all who work in what is Vanmechelen’s central focus: bio-

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cultural diversity. OpUnDi is both a sanctuary and a home base for the various research projects within Vanmechelen’s intellectual biotope, and for the various foundations that coordinate and propagate the operation and the results of that research. Cosmogolem; a four-metre tall wooden giant that aims to help children find their own voice and identity. The project reflects hope and faith in the future. Via a hatch placed near his heart, children can share their wishes and dreams with the giant. Every Cosmogolem is created in partnership with local organisations. On its travels around the world, the golem provides a link between cultures. In 2010 the Cosmogolem Foundation was founded to coordinate the growing children right’s project. Anno 2020, more then 40 Cosmogolems can be found around the world. MOUTH Foundation; Founded in 2014, MOUTH is a philanthropic foundation which brings together art, science and people for diversity. It partners with individuals and organisations worldwide to put diversity front and center of the global development agenda. The aim is a new, more constructive social and ecological balance. The Walking Egg; The Walking Egg project was conceived in 1997 in Genk, in a partnership between Koen Vanmechelen and fertility specialist Willem Ombelet. This was part of an international convention on fertility and infertility which brought together over seven hundred medical specialists from around the world. One of the results from the cross pollination between art and the fertility science was The Walking Egg Magazine, a magazine in which science, art and philosophy come together. The Walking Egg got its name from the eponymous work of art Vanmechelen made for the convention. On the intersection of art and science, The Walking Egg focuses on fertility and reproduction. In 2010 the non-profit The Walking Egg (TWE) was founded to provide fertility treatments for women in developing countries. In 2015, the first Walking Egg Fertility Centre opened its doors in Ghana. Global Open Farms; From LABIOMISTA, Vanmechelen builds a network of Open Farms across the world. For the artist, art extends beyond the object: from animals deep into communities. The farms are sanctuaries for creation and reinvention. Real-life crossroads, where art, science and industry meet - at unconventional, inspiring and unique locations. All are situated at the intersection of man, culture and nature: present, past and future. Embedded in the very communities that are essential to the flourishing of each project.

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NOT TO BE MISTAKEN Koen Vanmechelen 1986 - 2021

Publisher LABIOMISTA Press Artist Koen Vanmechelen Curator Didi Bozzini Managing editor Goele Schoofs Texts Didi Bozzini Christine Vuegen Filip Luyckx Agnes Husslein Peter Dupont Edith Doove Frank van de Schoor Mike Phillips Susan M. Squier Peter Noever Adriano Berengo Anna Luyten Jill Silverman van Coengrachts Mario Botta James Putnam Rod Mengham Hanna Johansson English translation of Didi Bozzini’s texts Léon Bozzini Copy-editor Adeline Moons Printing Gruppo Spaggiari Parma Graphic Design Geoffrey Brusatto With special thanks to Céline Mannens and Kris Vervaeke Photo selection & Editing Kris Vervaeke

Photographers Alex Deyaert (p 8-15, 17, 20, 48, 54-55, 78-79, 82, 86-90) Magali Merzougui (p 16, 18-19) Kris Vervaeke (p 21-31, 40, 43, 44-45, 50-51, 72-74, 144-145, 148, 156, 157, 158-160, 166-167, 169, 170, 172-179, 181, 184, 186, 187, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198-202, 203, 204-213, 214, 215, 219, 221, 222, 223) Stoffel Hias (p 32-33, 41, 43, 49, 52-53, 76-77, 91, 94, 100, 102, 104-105, 110-117, 124, 131, 133, 135, 136-137, 156, 182-183, 188, 214) Gaétan Francken (p 34-37) Philippe van Gelooven (p 38-39, 95, 101, 107, 109, 139, 220, 222) PD Rearick (p 42, 134, 135) Mark Machiels (p 46-47, 119) Patrick Despiegelaere (p 80-81) Koen Vanmechelen (p 80-81, 92-93, 97) Mariapia Bellis (p 83) Francesco Ferruzzi (p 84-85) Mine Dalemans (p 96, 98-99, 195) Inge Kindt (p 97, 129) Francesco Allegretto (p 103) Goele Schoofs (p 106, 108, 122, 131, 132, 139, 140-141, 143, 146-147, 165, 194) Yu Chen (p 107, 118, 123) Jian Tao (p 120-121) Steven Van Roy (p 125) Romain Darnaud (p 126-127) Sebastiano Pellion (p 128) Amy Day (p 129) Stephen White (p 130) Bert Janssen (p 133) Alison Wong (p 135) Harold Naeye (p 138) Arthur Los (p 138) Webster (p 142) Camille Hanotte (p 147) Sampo Linkoneva (p 148, 149, 150-151) Beatriz Posada (p 152-153) Enrico Cano (p 154-155, 162-163, 168, 171, 184, 218) Kristof Vrancken (p 164-165) Jeroen Verrecht (p 180, 217) Els Wouters-mintdesign.be (p 187, 188, 189) Tony van Galen (p 185, 194) Boumediene Belbachir (p 190-191, 197) Selma Gurbuz (p 203) Alix Spooren (p 192, 214) Birgit Stulens (p 216) Pieter Simons (p 220)

ISBN 9789083184302 With special thanks to Gruppo Spaggiari Parma All artworks and photographs unless stated otherwise © Koen Vanmechelen All taxidermic animals have died a natural death. 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. www.labiomista.com

This volume includes fragments and memories of the thirty-year-long journey that saw Koen Vanmechelen create his first assemblages in the ‘80s, carry on a vast program of poultry crossbreeding and, eventually, open LABIOMISTA, the great park for biocultural diversity inaugurated in Genk in 2019. It is a story of phantasies and intuitions, studies and inventions, encounters and collaborations. A story of men and animals, of travels to either the far ends of our planet or the four corners of the atelier, of discoveries and unexpected creations. The story of an artist who found the secret of fertility in diversity and, within it, the very reason for being of his artwork. Didi Bozzini, curator

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