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At the Gallery
This August, Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen comes to Harare with an exhibition that will make its Africa debut at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. ‘Planetary Community Chicken’ is an installation that serves as a bridge between the interlinking worlds of art and science, this will be facilitated via the transformation of the Courtauld Gallery into a breeding centre with an enduring concept that is as old as the human race.

‘Planetary Community Chicken’ opens at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare on August 6, 2016. The exhibition will partner with local Social Entrepreneur; Chido Govera, a local food expert who will be facilitating a mushroom project and eggs sale that will go towards the Future of Hope Foundation.

The main aim of the ‘Planetary Community Chicken’ project is firmly rooted in creating a fowl for the grassroots communities all around the world. Poultry flocks have suffered considerably as their gene pools have been becoming prone to desolating recession; coupled with the mass commercialisation of the agricultural industrial complex can lead to a diminutive archetype of the species, or when worse comes to worst, extinction!

The breeding of an archetypal chicken is a carry forward from Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken Project which saw provides an indigenous chicken that lays a regular egg. The resultant breed from this egg is expressive of the Planetary capacity of the project, where it becomes the local species in that particular area. Considering the Zimbabwean context, one may look at a cross between the Cosmopolitan Rooster with the local nom de plume “Roadrunner” variety. The benefits that may arise from this are nondescript; a virile breed may be developed, productive enough to sustain communities that live by means of subsistence in as much as the breed can be a commercially viable vehicle.

An interactive console known as the CosmoGolem will be erected in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden for the duration of the exhibition. The CosmoGolem is a gigantic wooden humanoid sculpture created by the Vanmechelen that stands approximately four meters high.

It represents the ideals of hope and evolution spreading across the world. The CosmoGolem is hollow and in its shuttered heart people can deposit their dreams and wishes. By travelling around the world carrying all these dreams and wishes, CosmoGolem stimulates cultural diversity and sets to insert keystones between cultures.

The CosmoGolem seeks to draw attention to the importance of universal human rights and bears a specified interest to universal children’s rights. It fuels cross-border communication and creates mutual ‘cosmopolitan’ understanding.

By moving around the planet, the CosmoGolem urges people to get involved. Its placement in the Sculpture Garden ensures public interaction and discourse around the sculpture. Frequented by schoolchildren and students, this structure will represent an open space for play and discussion. Its uncanny resemblance to Native American totemic structures has the spiritual element enshrined to its gait; the spirit expressed herein is not that of faith or politics, but the human experience as a whole. Underneath all these elements lies a phenomenon which humanity may be inspired by. Vanmechelen’s coop is the cosmos; chickens from France, Senegal, the United States of America, Indonesia, Egypt, Cuba live in a utopian understanding and share the same feed in a mostly non-violent manner.

The realisation of this Cosmopolitan reciprocal action is highly representative of human interaction historically and contemporarily; the need to work instinctively to innovate communities globally, in an equitable manner that guarantees peace for all humankind.