SANTIAGO: Last year, Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground beef to make meatballs, which he fried in olive oil and displayed in a public gallery.
This year, he plans to climb Western Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc on the French-Italian border, colour the summit pink and declare it an independent state, with himself as president.
His work has been slammed as disgusting, publicity-seeking and immoral but Evaristti says he is simply trying to highlight some of the double standards he sees in the world around him.
“What I’m trying to do with these works is to give society a jolt and make it ask questions,” the 44-year-old said in a telephone interview from Denmark, where he lives with his wife and children.
“And it can answer those questions, and in that way maybe we can be a little better as human beings.”
Evaristti’s meatballs piece consists of 13 tins of the meat on a long table, in an echo of Christ’s last supper.
He says the work is about the sanctity of the body and an unhealthy modern obsession with food and weight loss.
“Firstly, I want to show people that meatballs made with my fat are no more disgusting than the meatballs you buy in the supermarket,” he said.
“Secondly, it’s a dialogue with a modern society that lives to eat, rather than eating to live as it should be.
“You eat, and when you’re fat, you go to a clinic, have an operation, have your fat removed and you start to eat again.”
When he displayed the piece in Chile, Evaristti invited 12 people to join him in eating the meatballs in a last supper.
How did they taste? “Even better than my grandmother's,” he said.
In perhaps his most infamous work, Evaristti filled food blenders with water, dropped live goldfish into them and plugged them into the electricity mains in an art gallery.
He gave the public the option of making their own fish soup by simply flicking a switch.
He also painted an iceberg in Greenland red and placed an embalmed human corpse in the front seat of a Ferrari, all in the name of art and introspection.
