Andrea Luka Zimmerman | Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow

About

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow by Andrea Luka Zimmerman (2002) and Nightcleaners by the Berwick Street Collective (1975) as part of a season of politically engaged art, which commenced with the live screening of the Creative Time Summit, 2014, from Stockholm at MCAC on Friday 14th and 15th November. 

The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow (2002, 15 mins) is a film by German artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman who won the 2014 Artangel Open award for her collaborative project Cycle with Adrian Jackson (of Cardboard Citizens). She has been making films since 1998, originally as part of the collective Vision Machine, which worked in the USA and Indonesia, exploring the impact of globalisation, power, and denied histories.  The artist has presented widely on her work and its concerns at numerous conferences, symposia, film festivals, cinemas, and cultural/activist spaces within the UK and internationally.

Vision Machine on The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow: 'From today's menu, I recommend Capitalism or Cannibalism; Communism is off. Our Catholicism is rather good, though; it comes with a liberal sauce or tourist topping. This is our pre-theatre-of-poverty menu.

Meanwhile, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow grows over-rapidly large on a forced steroidal diet. Elsewhere, the cousins of The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow pluck and hack in feathered ecstasy over the carcass of a chicken too careless crossing the road. This bright and colourful scene is but a moment of a clamorous market economy busy with flies and children; industrious striped-potbellied pigs rummaging through heaps between houses half-sunk in muddy water, while villagers jump from stone to stone.

Cannibalism has long been a favourite on western menus. Other peoples' cannibalism, that is. More than a colonial culinary oddity, it divided the men from the animals; the savagery of the conquistadors was projected onto their victims - after all, they, too, sported feathers. Rumours of cannibalism persist in tourist guides and travel books today; some people still wear feathers (though most of them have long since died of influenza).

Specially bred with less feathers and more meat, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film that dream-walks from the beaches of Mirtsdroy, where huge tourists, plucked and oiled, baste themselves standing up, to the muddy markets of Sumatra, via an archipelago of Export-Processing zones and television archives. Hand processed with bacterially cultured stock, the images are themselves in organic decay; all the coloursand forms of the scrap heap.

Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation, refuse and refusal: TheDelmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.' 

Millennium Court Arts Centre would like to thank Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lux, London.