Dom Perignon

2008. crox 282, Adam Geczy (AU). Burried Alive, een video-presentatie. Een maand later begint in zelfde ruimte crox 289, TVF art doc cinema.
Tijdens de openingsavond, eind november 2008, de periode combineert projecten van Lien Nollet, Sander Buyck en Adam Geczy, presenteert Geczy Toasting on the World Food Crisis with a Bottle of Dom Perignon, een performance die hij speciaal voor die avond had bedacht. In een editie van Australian Monthly gaat hij dieper in op de betekenis van dit project. Het is het eerste deel van een drieluik. In 2010 volgt het tweede deel, Remember To Forget The Congo. Toasting on is een studie naar levend model, de economisch crisis. Geczy redeneert over wat we wereldwijd aan armoede hebben en ledigt een fles Dom Perignon. --->Geczy

'My previous exhibition in late 2008 at the
experimental art space in Ghent, Croxhapox, was
accompanied by the performance, Toasting the world food
crisis with a bottle of Dom Perignon. It was a piece whose
idea came from those rare occasions when, on savouring an
expensive meal or wine, one momentarily feels a pang of
shame when the mind strays to consider the logical force of
such extravagance in terms of our normal weekly expenses.
But if we then transplant these scruples into the realm of
demography, it is as if when eating a steak, the suppressed
shame of the routine terrors of the slaughterhouse must
now also extend to the plight of underprivileged humanity.
When we indulge in an expensive wine we could be feeding a
village. Bon santé.
Over several months I amassed mostly arbitrary
statistics of the cost of food and labour in various African
countries relative to a sip of Dom Perignon, the luxury drink
par excellence. Based on an average price of US$200, one
sip equates to around $8, and its translation into the
activities of the 'developing' (developing into what?) world is
crushing. During the performance I sat below a screen and
slowly consumed the bottle, my face painted a pale blue for
defamiliarisation. A litany of statements divided into short
phrases pulsed away in an almost inexorable rhythm: ‘In
Guinea-Bissau, the average annual gross income is $200,
which is the average price of a bottle of Dom Perignon’, or ‘In
Bangladesh well over half the population live on less than a
dollar a day. That is, about 12% of a single sip’. By the
second draught of wine I felt disgusted, which suggested
that the performance was working its negative magic over
me, and possibly over those watching it. Unusually, the
audience stood largely rooted to the spot, entranced and
appalled by the spectacle.'
Fragment uit Remember To Forget The Congo; The Monthly,
juli 2010.