Chicken Coop

The starting point can be found in a story recounted by the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea in his bookDe Bello Vandalico (The Vandal), which goes like this:

‘... they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, “And yet it has just eaten from my hands!” For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: “But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.” So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed.’

Procopius was talking about the famous Sack of Rome by the Visigoths led by King Alaric. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon was already sceptical about this literal ‘anecdote’ that portrays the Christian emperor Honorius as a weak, extravagant fool hanging on to old pagan customs and unconcerned with Rome, its Senate and its enemy Alaric. But as Vinciane Despret would say, the right question is: why chickens?

For our purposes, it was interesting to read about the political awareness of space in the chickens described by Giorgio Vallortigara in his book Cervello di gallina (2005), literally ‘hen’s brain’, an Italian euphemism equivalent to ‘birdbrain’. The dimension of space is linked to the perception of com - munity: the movement of the group, the distribution of food and the place where eggs are laid all determine chickens’ distinctive angular path, a bit like a knight in a game of chess. The animot, said Derrida, should combine the zoology and the cultural significance of animals.

The invitation to collaborate on this work concerns Teresa Lanceta in various ways: there is of course the carpet in the painting by British artist John W. Waterhouse, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (1883), but there is also her interest in Martin Kippenberger’s Disco Chicken (1988), and the gift of Bert Flint’s adage at the Tiskiwin Museum in Marrakesh, ‘donning feathers is a form of decolonisation’. And there is of course her memorable statement: ‘my political consciousness was born when El Lute was arrested and his first charge was stealing chickens’. I think that Teresa Lanceta’s carpets and wall hangings, her tapestries, have always explored a different way of understanding space physically and symbolically, always aware of the need for a new distribution, which is essentially what we are attempting.

The tapestry that Lanceta has made with the old items of clothing and leftover wool offered by friends and neighbours is woven with different techniques, but mainly jarapa, which is crafted from scraps and offcuts. The pattern is based on some of the geometric floors on which chickens performed their legislative duties in ancient Rome. The Romans gave us the legal system, but their laws often had to be ratified by the movements of a group of chickens observed and interpreted by the augur-priests. From the mosaics of Villa of Livia Ad Gallina Albas to the floor of the Curia Julia – the seat of the Roman Senate during the reign of Honorius – chickens also stood for plebiscitary democracy: over these old practices of Etruscan divination, the emperor preferred the modern augury of the sacrificed rooster, which allowed its liver to be examined, always in private. Chickens represented contradictory pairs: archaic religion and the modern plebs, the prudence of the old senators and the crazy extravagance of the emperor, secular paganism and the weakness of the Christians. But the important thing for us is the floor that these contradictions trod.

Our chicken coops are full of politicians, philosophers and fools: of chickens, that is. As in Luigi Malerba’s Le galline pensierose (2008), a chicken is supposedly the model fool. María Zambrano gave a good account of that gait in which there are no straight lines, that constant dancing around something, that pendulous swaying of the head saying something or other, and that expression, which is often interpreted as foolishness or idiocy and is only akin to the joy of a living being who has found love and freedom at the same time. It is always a hypnotic pleasure to watch chickens.

Our tapestry is only intended as a kind of magnifying glass, an optical instrument to enhance the pleasure of those who stop and look. We also offer a few texts and pages of notes in which to keep adding to the almost infinite number of observations.

Hens’ Assembly

HOUELLEBECQ HEN

‘[...] It isn’t just about our extermination. When the description is cruel, and one senses that a certain pleasure in horror drives the denunciation. A fascination with evil. Michel, who acts as a kind of Woody Allen of the sinister, gives an enthralled description of our extermination – fascination being related to fascism not only in the etymological sense. The industrialisation of our death. Crammed into farms to either produce eggs or be turned into cheap meat, eating poultry feed like animals next to our dead companions. I know it’s hard to denounce this without infusing language with death, with a fascination for things sinister. But that’s what we’re here to do, isn’t it?’

EL PRAT HEN

‘[...] Orwell’s treatment of us in Animal Farm is unfair, isn’t it? Such contempt for hens, it’s not right, it really isn’t... George, Georges, or Jordi drew on his experiences in Catalonia when Communists, Catalan Nationalists and Republicans quelled the revolution that anarchists and the POUM had started following the coup d’état by the Spanish Catholics, Nationalists and Fascists... And where does that leave us, then, us hens? The sheep, it seems, are the peasants of the Pyrenean hinterland, towing the line any pig sets down. But what about the hens? As we walk on two legs, like humans, we are under suspicion; but no, we are not just underlings or rowdy spectators...’

CHICKENS WE ARE (ON THE INTERNET)

‘Elegant, proud, light and vigorous, black. Smooth, soft, delicate, brown. Deepchested, broad, muscular, white. Docile and affectionate, there are white ones and black ones. Round, vivacious, familiar, dark brown. Longbodied, slightly squat, golden. Harmonious and vigorous in deportment, reddish. Composed, well-sized, blonde. Serious, responsible, pleasant, good with people, honest and hard-working. Timewasters need not apply.’

WHITE-BLONDE EMPORDANESA HEN

‘It’s true, we have market value. We are bought and sold. Not only as food, but also as egg layers, whores, kellys [hotel room at - tendants] and as skin from which our feathers are plucked to write these lines. And the fact is, not only do we have language, but we also have things to say, demands to make and opinions on how our coop should be run. When I see the original hens, the daughters of the oldest hens in the place, carry on as if they were the owners of this yard, it makes me want to laugh. Of course, their clucking is different from our clucking, no one’s doubting that or asking for anything but naturalness. But a cluck cannot establish dominion. And just look at them, removing their feathers and walking like men, almost without bending their legs, all high and mighty. Not Primo de Rivera or the Civil War or anything ever managed to crush us; and now, Lord knows, we may have to go back to the Penedès.’

PENEDÈS HEN

‘We are a hopeless case! Anyone would think bird flu had eaten our brains! But that flu, disease, plague or epidemic seems to have panicked humans especially because they brought in experts to manage it. Might they have forgotten about us? Could this be endemic?’

LEGANÉS HEN

‘Life is one long reason to be cheerful’, mused the fox as he entered the coop, stuffed in his white doctor’s coat, to tend to the sick hens. It’s an adage you also hear on the lips of many a politician and bigwig as they make their chauffeur-driven ways to the courts to deliberate on their embezzlements, their 1% or 3% taken in bribes, their cronyism... in short, on their multiple profiteering schemes. Like the fox, they smile with wily satisfaction and throw seductive and defiant glances at the crowd as they proceed with shameless poise. But the confidence of the corrupt should not surprise us because we have seen how their culpability often gets diluted in legal cosmogonies, and irrefutable proof of their criminality is ‘punished’ with a slap on the wrist and a ‘you pay us back what you can, when you can’... In short, like us the hens can tell something is up. They regard with suspicion and horror this bogus doctor who is specifically trained to eat them, because their usual doctor, the one who used to look after them, has been devoured by this vicious world.

THE RUDE HEN

‘What about the boy whose deranged mother cut him up and stewed him in honour of a saint and was then put back together again by this same saint and brought back to life?¹ What was his first reaction? Did he sympathise with the chicken that had taken his place in the pot and go down as some late medieval precursor of the Anti-Oedipus theory?’

PENEDÈS HEN

‘But sisters and brothers, we can use violence! We have no choice. It’s a dangerous path, but... We know that many of our chickens have been re-educated: the whitefaces of Seville have been turned into Jerezanos or Canarians, and Malaya, Sweater and Shamo into fighting cocks! What a family, yes, our very own... Like a pack of dogs, we are! They say they’re coming to defend us, but they’ll eliminate not only the fox and the farmer, but us too! How are we going to stop these people who say they are one of us? Is it enough just to remove their spurs? Clip their combs? Fire rubber bullets at them?’

VICENTA HEN

‘My husband used to kill them, but he doesn’t want to do that anymore, and my daughter shudders when I do it, but then I say to them: “So what shall we do – eat live chicken?”’

JAPANESE PHOENIX HEN

‘There has to be a way. A way of talking about the cruelty of the world without it obscuring our words. Reality – birth, death, being eaten – can’t be solved with some quack remedy. The bain-marie is our gas chamber. They often pluck us alive! Between ending up in a fricassee or in a mass grave, which do we choose? Do we settle for black humour?’

GUILLERMO THE COCK IN AN ERMINE CAPE

‘“Hen, hen, hen! whooped a pack of wolf cubs dressed in their finest clothes, knife and fork at the ready. Their mother, the shewolf Máxima, was stewing a Jærhøns cock and stirring the pot with loving devotion. The cock had been a magnificent specimen, with a superb crest and feathers, and its eyes shed tears like diamonds. The scene was extraordinarily beautiful; the sentiments depicted both opposing and truthful”. Excerpt of an investiture speech delivered in the European Parliament. There was much applause and some booing.’

BURUNDI HEN

‘For those who don’t have access to it, food is a basic need; for those who do, it is a responsibility. From necessity to debit, from consumer to participant. We are fields of almond trees, cherry orchards, kitchen gardens and vineyards. And chickens and copper.’

BERGISCHE KRÄHER CHICKEN

‘It’s true, a hen is not the sum of its dismembered limbs... Breast, thighs, wings, livers, heart... they don’t make up a chicken. The truth is that our species, harassed by predators of all kinds, owes its survival to domestication. We are hundreds of species and millions of individuals thanks to this process of civilisation that has spread us all across the world. Scientists say we are a success as a species. Heaven, our paradise, is being on display in kosher butchers, delicatessens and supermarkets. But we are not idiots! Or rather: it is our right to be idiots, to live the joy of the moment, to delight in the countryside... Our right to be unproductive. And what about our song? Is my song not appreciated?’