One Chicken
In her work, Manuela Braunmüller focuses on how we treat our cows, chickens and pigs. The grand-scale industrial farming of animals is an abstraction for many people, yet at the same time we are constantly fed a romantic vision of the production process behind these animal-derived products. In the discussion on the future of the human-animal relationship in agriculture, there are ultimately two perspectives: of the consumer and of the animal that is eaten. The difference is that only humans can attach value to life. This has enormous consequences.
Of the 60 billion land animals slaughtered annually worldwide, 57 billion are chickens. ‘One Chicken’ by Manuela Braunmüller urges us to stop imagining the numbers and to look at the individual animal. The skeleton of a chicken consists of about 130 bones. By showing these separately, the chicken suddenly becomes a unique and complex animal, offering a universe of unknown details and beauty.
