A Modest Proposal by Tania Blanco

About

A Modest Proposal (2016-2017) is a proposal that is critical of the current food industrialisation process, and especially of the relationship between new forms of food production and distribution and marketing and advertising, an alliance that is helping (in these times of post-truth) to mask health hazards, hide the situation of commercial abuse or labour exploitation in which foods are often produced and distributed, while proposing identities and specific life styles around the purchase of these as consumer goods.

In this project, Tania Blanco synthesises two of the main issues that define her practice: on the one hand, the techno-scientific development and its separation from nature, which is expressed here by the concern about the biological aspect of the current agro-food industry, which is based upon transgenic and agro-toxic produce and starts out from a radically anthropocentric confidence in scientific knowledge and its ability to control any kind of occurring variables in the natural process. On the other hand, the issue of information control and the technologies of truth production, as exhibited in the media manipulation that marketing and publicity, by means of different strategies, offer the food business. Behind the discourse of A Modest Proposal there is a thinking the political that stems from forms of critical thinking such as ecology and feminism, which from the analysis of the everyday experience and the relationship between the public and the private have revalued citizen engagement and the capacity of political action, by including the private dimension as a space for social transformation.

A Modest Proposal is an exercise in critical misrepresentation of the discourse or the narrative that the consumer object conveys, with references to production or food distribution labels (Lidl, Mercadona, Roundup or Kellogs) with whom it establishes ironic word games or graphic sarcasms, in a strategy of anti-advertisement close to contemporary activist movements like brandalism. In short, a critical proposal on the current dystopia in which the empire of economic reason imposes.