Artist Koen Vanmechelen in conversation with the ecosystem.
Initiated during the COVID-19 pandamic, the artist Koen Vanmechelen invites you inside his overactive but quarantined brain and takes you with him on his journey of discovery. He reaches out to different experts in the world. Together, they reflect on the evolving legacy of the human animal and explore the different ways we choose to live together.
Vanmechelen's performance The Worth of Life forms the inspiration for the pilot of The Battery Channel. During this performance, the artist joins his chickens in quarantine, turning this chicken stable into a tableau vivant. The metaphor is our new reality. We have become the chicken, kept indoors, cordoned off, kept apart. After repeatedly isolating other infected species we are now quarantining ourselves, the most domesticated species of all.
Is this the worth of life?
With this question, Vanmechelen reaches out to Didi Bozzini, an Italian curator residing in Parma, the epicenter of the pandemic. Bozzini also curated Vanmechelen's solo exhibition The Worth of Life, last year at the Teatro dell' Architettura in Mendrisio (CH). Professor Behavioral Ecology Hans Van Dyck (UCL) analyses from a biological perspective. His brother, actor and writer Tom Van Dyck gets the final say.
Host Nathalie Delporte guides you through a story of isolation, chickens and parma cheese.
There is a sacrality in nature, in life, in people, in things and in animals. We have to rediscover the sacred worth of life.
