The act of eating is placed between tradition and innovation.
It is tradition as it is made up of knowledge, techniques, values that are handed down to us; it is innovation as those knowledge, those techniques and those values modify the position of man in the environmental context, allowing man to evolve in his way of living.
Food is a decisive element in describing the identity – always multifaceted – to which each of us belongs and is one of the most effective tools for communicating it.
The reason why there are specific food behaviors in every culture and religion is that they allow us to describe our status.
The foods themselves take on symbolic, metaphysical, moral and social values, capable of functioning as containers or vectors of ideology.
Food is humanly universal, as a matter of life and death, yet it is profoundly variable, diversified, arbitrary and full of “other” symbolic meanings.
Every cuisine, from the simplest to the most complex, from east to west of the world, it’s a system of cultural combinations.
For the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, men’s relationship with food is analogous to their relationship with language. The human language emits sounds because it is naturally predisposed to do so, but language, grammatical rules, syllables, phonemes, words are the result of some of the infinite cultural combinations in which sounds can be articulated.
The same thing happens in the kitchen: food is the natural source of life, but the way we eat is completely cultural.
Many Jewish and Muslim researcher, for example, worked during the 17th and 18th centuries to demonstrate that there was a scientific basis for which pork was forbidden both in Islam and in Judaism. It was thought that the reason for this taboo was that the pig carried diseases, then that its meat could not be stored appropriately in certain climatic zones, finally it was said that the omnivorous nature of the pig made its meat difficult to digest . None of these reasons can really explain this taboo by itself, because the fact of forbidding the consumption of pork meat has no “scientific” reasons, but rather historical and cultural ones.
There would be an infinite number of examples and they touch on the most varied taboos on animal meat (from horse to cat, from dog to snake), even refraining from eating human flesh is not, in fact, a universal taboo.
And this is the theme of this exhibition project.
Accepting that we are what we eat (food is one of the constituent elements of our multifaceted identity) is already very complicated in itself; but even more complicated is to imagine that in theory – and sometimes also in practice – the reverse would be possible:
EAT WHAT WE ARE.
The idea that someone bites into our meat or that we can find ourselves in front of a banquet of human flesh – perhaps believing that it is “harmless” beef – is what is presented in this exhibition project.
The meats – post-human – in front of your eyes are ready to be sold and eaten.
You are in a post-butcher-industrial at this moment.
It’s up to you to choose the piece and how many KG of meat to buy.
Few practices appear ambivalent, grotesque, magnetic like the practice of cannibalism: an archaic and ancestral taboo, which has to do with the deep discovery of oneself and with the recognition that our identity can be violated, torn to pieces and eaten one piece at a time.
So faced with this possibility of buying and eating post-industrial meat, what is the weight / what is the value we give to THIS MEAT?
The project is funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, co-financed by the European Union.
Installation view
Post-Industrial Butchery
text by Elizabet Aziz
Entering the exhibition feels like stepping into a familiar place — commercial, functional, devoid of sentiment. White tiles. Metal structures. Hanging cuts of meat. Knives arranged like inventory.
Everything appears to be under control.
It is precisely this apparent normality that constitutes the project’s first gesture.
The space reproduces the architecture of a butcher shop — a site where life is definitively transformed into product. Yet here, the focus is not on a specific type of meat, but on the very idea of corporeality as raw material. The blood-red veins in the tiles are not merely decorative; they function as a memory of the interior, as a surface that fails to conceal the organic.
The metal panel with cut-out knife silhouettes resembles a catalogue of possibilities. Each tool implies a different cut, a different technique, a different mode of division. Butchering emerges as an act of knowledge and power. To cut is to classify. To assign value. To decide what is prime and what is waste.
The hanging “pieces” of meat, stripped of any specific anatomical identity, exist in a state of indeterminacy. They are at once recognizable and unrecognizable. This ambiguity generates tension: the viewer searches for species, origin, category — but receives no certain answer.
In this way, the very mechanism of distance is destabilized. If we cannot clearly name what we are looking at, can we comfortably consume it?
The project questions the industrial anonymity of meat. In the contemporary economy, the body — human or animal — is often reduced to a resource: measurable, marketable, optimizable. Here, that logic is taken to its extreme. The space is not merely a stage, but a simulation of a market in which the subject itself may become a commodity.
Cannibalism appears not as a literal act, but as a structural metaphor: a society that systematically “consumes” its own bodies — through labor, through image, through biopolitical control. In this sense, the meat before us is post-human — it belongs to a world in which the boundary between living body and material has been fully eroded.
The viewer moves between the cold aesthetics of minimalism and the aggressive materiality of red. Between the cleanliness of the tiles and their organic imitation of flesh. Between the instrument and the victim.
And the question remains:
When everything can be turned into a product, what remains untouchable?
And if the body is already part of the economic cycle, who determines its value?
The exhibition does not offer a moral stance, but activates a space of choice.
You are in the room.
The tools are available.
The meat is hanging.
What would you do?
Artworks
Post-industrial butchery I
Matal, ceramics
Dimentions: diameter 85cm / h:120cm
Post-industrial butchery Series
Meat I
Matal, ceramics
Dimentions: 30 x 39 x 30.5 cm
Post-industrial butchery Series
Meat IV
Matal, ceramics
Dimentions: 40x20x16.5 cm
Post-industrial butchery Knives
Steel
Dimentions: 110×75
edition of 3
Post-industrial butchery Series
Drawing II
crayons
Dimentions: 31x31cm
About the artist
Valentina Sciarra
Valentina Sciarra (born in Rome, Italy 1983) lives and works between Rome and Sofia. After a Masters Degree in Law, she got her Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome with a thesis on «Les espaces en friches» in the urban space (Engl. “Wastelands in the Urban Space”), written during a study program at Villa Arson Art Academy in Nice, France. She currently has her studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she completed a Masters degree in Sculpture at the National Academy of Art in 2018.
She is working mainly on sculpture, video and in-situ intervention, all her project arise form a deep conceptual and aesthetic research. In addition to specific research on the transformation of matter in sculpture, Valentina Sciarra’s exhibition projects offer reflections on collective issues such as the perception of time and memory in the contemporary era or the search for a relational identity capable of combining man-nature-culture. She has made permanent site-specific commissions in France, Italy, Bulgaria. She was supported by the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award in 2019 and 2018 and in 2020 she got the fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart with which she continues to collaborate for exhibitions and publications. In 2022 she participated in Manifesta European Biennale 14 – in Pristina with the collective project Self-splaining (a Triumph of Empathy) curated by Istitute of Contemporary Art Sofia.
“Charta” Ltd. is a beneficiary of the project “Holding an exhibition “Post-Industrıal Butchery” by the Italian artist Valentina Sciarra at the Charta Gallery”, implemented in connection with a concluded administrative contract for grant aid No. BG-RRP-11.024-0041-C01 under procedure No. BG-RRP-11.024 “Grant aid scheme “Presentation to the Bulgarian public of contemporary European productions from the CTI sector”, National Recovery and Sustainability Plan.