Plastivores

Natalia Carminati.

Plastivores on pet food bowl. 28 x 21 x 5,5 cm. Food art, artistic intervention and installation. Haribo bear, homemade baby marshmallows, Ziploc bags, stickers, helium balloons, and stickers on original Haribo Gold-Bear packets. 2017.

The concept of Plastivores emerged from the need to define consumers who have a diet based on artificial flavours, poisonous sweeteners and cocktails of preservatives dyed with striking colourants and processed into beautifully packaged edible objects. Candy as the fundamental exponent of this type of diet has served to materialize different perspectives of the project.

On the one hand, the gathered information has been camouflaged in the HARIBO world through an intervention in its traditional Gold-Bears product. The intervention establishes a direct reflexive dialogue with the public by recreating the candy world of Haribo, the best representative of both traditions for candy and the contemporary tendency to transform everything we love into candy. On the other hand and as a counteraction to the mass production of industrial edibles, I’ve used a family recipe to make homemade sleeping marshmallow babies one by one. The recipe allowed me to experiment, test and manipulate the visual appearance of the candy by the use of different qualities of sugar and amounts of jelly. Offered to the public in a happening at Fabra i Coats – Factory of Creation, the visually-driven choices of the participants revealed the reason why the industry uses artificial ingredients that produce edible toys rather than natural ingredients which result in dull-looking items.

Plastivores allow experimentation, interaction and dialogue with the public around the significance of food, how we relate to it in everyday life and the multiple roles it fulfils in contemporary society which leads us to think of food as a powerful tool for mass control.

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$600 or $60 x 10 months with Art Money

Natalia Carminati gallery

$600.00