“Because when you’re the best, everyone wants a piece of you.” KFC, Chicken Town, 2019.

Giuseppe Abate’s work, presented and designed for Toast spaces, retraces the recent years of his research on organic materials derived from the processing of waste from the chicken industry. Through chemical and artisanal processes, what remains of the animal after food consumption is transformed into material useful for reformulating painting, sculpting, tanning, and leatherworking techniques. However, it’s not just the practical use that interests Abate; rather, the chicken becomes, within his research, a graft to activate reflections related to society, consumption, and advertising.

On the occasion of the TFC exhibition, the artwork “To get to the other side” will be displayed. This element is also at the center of the magazine created specifically for the exhibition, seen as an extension of it in space and time. The magazine, containing various images from Abate’s visual archive, is the result of collaborative work and employs the graphic aesthetics of fashion advertising’s coolness, subverting them internally through a mimetic operation that nevertheless reveals its fractures.

She earned a master’s degree in Cultural Heritage Management from the 24Ore Business School in Rome in 2021. Prior to that, she graduated with a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Turin, with a thesis in the Aesthetics of the Ugly. For the past two years, she has been developing exhibition and editorial projects with artists in research spaces, in addition to collaborating with various artist residencies, including CRIPTA747 in Turin and Via-Farini-in-Residence in Milan.