In her sculpture ChickieNobs, Alfiya Valitova explores the role of disgust in shaping ethical responses to scientific innovation in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The ChickieNobs of the novel are a project developed by the AgriCouture students at the Watson-Crick Institute, designed to efficiently produce edible chicken parts. The “chickens” have been genetically engineered for maximum efficiency, with legs or breasts growing around “a mouth opening at the top.”
While the AgriCouture students focus on pure capitalist efficiency, Valitova’s project highlights the scabs, scars, blood, and regrowth that provide uncanny reminders that even genetically engineered “chickens” are still, in some way, living beings. Her sculpture, made of a special blend of flour clay/putty that dries with a flesh-like texture, elicits an immediate shudder of disgust — the same, Valitova writes, that she felt on reading Atwood’s novel.
While Crake compares the structure of the ChickieNobs chickens to “the sea-anemone body plan,” Valitova draws on more familiar household objects to heighten the sense of the uncanny. The shape of her sculpture resembles a cactus while the arrangement of knobs growing out of fleshy craters recalls the seed pods of the lotus plant. The sculpture itself is “planted” in a ceramic planter, suggesting that a renewable ChickieNob “plant” might find a home in a window-box alongside basil, sage, and mint. Valitova’s materials likewise connect ChickieNobs — an emblem of mass-produced food — to the personal kitchen: as she writes in her reflection, “the recipe” for the clay “is not that different from a regular bread recipe.” In this way, her project highlights the Freudian sense of the uncanny as “unheimliche” or “unhomely” — the horrifying mixture of the familiar with the unfamiliar.
Yet by intentionally provoking a trypophobic response in her audience, Valitova might subtly suggest a gendered reading. Like Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, Valitova’s ChickieNobs uncomfortably link eroticism, food, flesh, and the home, forcing us to consider why this particular combination of symbols is so particularly disgusting.
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