Why chickens are at the center of the debate

The book Four hens

“Quattro Galline tells of a house, its owners and a chicken coop. Hens are the only point of view from which to understand something about themselves. In this hilarious meditation on what becomes memory or memory and what doesn't, Jackie Polzin answers the question of whether the chicken or the egg was born first. Hen. Animal synthesis of our nostalgia and our whys”.

We borrow the words of Chiara Valerio to tell a book recently released for Einaudi Stile Libero, Four hens. The story is apparently simple: a couple who, instead of taking a dog or a cat, lives with four chickens in a chicken coop. Through the story of the birds' everyday life, while the attachment to animals that are certainly not affectionate grows unexpectedly, the woman dissects her pain and her shortcomings. As if it were a treatise on philosophy , the book dispenses, in a witty and lashing way, ways of interpreting, living and caring.

“ [...] a moving and witty novel , light and poignant, a book about absence, about our continuous fight against loneliness, about the difficulty of communicating - but about the beauty of sometimes being able to do it - about motherhood at the beginning of the 21st century, about the need to take care of the others. There is a whole world full of emotions, in the small chicken coop imagined by Jackie Polzin” explains Nicola Lagioia.

The #PeppaFree installation (and adoption)

#PeppaFree is a life-size habitat for chickens that bursts into the space of the Edicola Radetzky in Milan, in viale Gorizia (Darsena side), from the 12 October to 2 November 2022.

Working through video, photography, performance and installation, the artist Giulia Roncucci weaves a path, curated by Claudia Zanfi, focused on the idea of freedom: its symbolisms, its protections and its contingencies.

Through a system of adoption, the hens freed from intensive farming will be welcomed in the gardens and parks of Milan, imagining a new way of experiencing the public green space, as a place of the community.

The (pop) Sant'Eliseo Farm

The freedom (to scratch)

The inspiration for the project comes from the payoff of the Free Spirit Farm, also designed by Visual Display together with the logo and brand identity, to represent this farm, where, among the few in Italy, raised in free range mode, various rare and particular species of hen, free to live in the pasture on the Friulian hills.

Rainbow Eggs

To make 'magical' the Sant'Eliseo Farm are eggs 'rainbow' - of the highest quality especially for the organoleptic properties that distinguish them - that produces: 'rainbow eggs' are not just shell-colored of egg, indeed, but also pink, blue, brown, green, white, red and even black.

The hens on the table

Rich in proteins, (good) fats, iron, zinc and vitamins, eggs provide beneficial nutritional properties for the organism and, if eaten for breakfast, energy. Even more so if the silhouettes of the hens decorate and color with fantasy - rural and free range - the table.

As in the plates in sustainable eucalyptus fiber from MariaVi, an artisan workshop founded in 2019 by Maria Vittoria Albertini that reproduces natural elements, plants and flowers but also animals, on the furnishing accessories it proposes.

A 'hatching' exhibition of a hen

To tell the truth, the tendency to put hens at the center of a conceptual reflection was widely anticipated in Turin in 2020, where an exhibition dedicated to works born during artistic residencies it was closed to the public but open to the inhabitants of the condominium-museum that housed it.

The even more particular peculiarity? GentiliVicini (read here) is was the first 'cova' exhibition project of Piera Valentina Gallov, a hen, as well as director of viadellafucina16, located in the multi-ethnic district of Porta Palazzo.