I helped my friend Itamar Gilboa during the Dutch Design Week to introduce his project Food Chain. This time we were cooking with chalk and giving form to several sculptures. There is still a long way to go for the realization of the remaining hundreds, all the support would be appreciated : www.foodchainproject.org
The Food Chain Project is a pop-up supermarket made entirely of sculptural groceries that represent Itamar Gilboa's consumption over 365 days.
Each individual part of the installation — ranging from a lemon to a carton of milk and from a can of tuna to a duck — can be bought separately at the exhibition. Seventy percent of the profits will be donated to NGOs fighting food issues, thereby creating a food chain: "What I ate turned into art, which, when sold, can again become food," explains Gilboa.
The Israeli-Dutch artist kept a diary of everything he ate and drank for the duration of a year. He meticulously kept track of his daily consumption. Some three years later, the results can be seen in a sculpture installation, the Food Chain Project. His installation, a traveling pop-up supermarket consisting of more than 8,000 white plaster sculptural groceries, physically represents Gilboa's yearly consumption.
Thinking about his personal consumption habits, Gilboa started to research the social implications of individual consumption choices on global food issues. By presenting the 8,000 products he consumed in a year, Gilboa aims to raise awareness and generate a wider discussion on global food issues. The installation is thought provoking and uses an inventive approach to point out our overconsumption, while hundreds of millions of people around the world still suffer from hunger every day.
