On Thursday evening I went to see Death by Chocolate by artists Rachel Darke and Abigail Duffty in the Vaad Gallery, Custard Factory. It was an evening of ‘performance based on the nature of chocolate and how it’s sold to the consumer’. The performance was based around chocolate-covered characters the naive sparrow, the mercenary magpies and the highly-sexed crows. A lot of it highlighted slave labour in chocolate farming. The show used fair trade chocolate from Tony’s Factory, Amsterdamn.
It also explored the ‘media’s exploitation of pleasure and sex as a selling tool’. In the corner was a TV screen showing a mix of chocolate adverts (without the brands). It was quite surprising, seeing the bare content streamed together showed how ridiculously sexualised it all is. Flake, Galaxy, Bounty – is that a chocolate bar in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? The most jaw-dropping was this one from Romania, where they don’t seem to have the same censorship as us. The intertwined dark and pale bodies cutting to a shot of chocolate meeting milk is well classy, and I particularly like the bit where his hand moves away from her breast to reveal a big boob of a hazelnut.
