Fleischerei Glück (Butcher Bliss)

There was a butcher in Tunis who wanted to honour the former president Zine Abedine Ben Ali. His idea was to call the shop “Butcher shop of the 7th November”, the day when Ben Ali assumed the Presidency in a "coup d'état médical" from then President Habib Bourguiba. After he did so, he disappeared without a trace. The line between insult and homage was transgressed through the unspoken proximity of slaughter and the governance of the former Tunisian regime.

Due to this buzz of the vanished butcher, I became aware of the butcher shops in Tunisia where freshly cut meet and bleeding animal heads are hung next to the shop doors. The purpose of this bizarre spectacle is to display freshness and quality—as long as the blood drips out of the meat, people know that it is fresh. The names given to these butcher shops, like “joy”, “happiness” or “peace” were also noteworthy.

My porcelain casts of stomach linings combine beauty and violence, since the slaughtering of an animal and the cutting and stretching of the stomachs are in fact violent and destructive acts. At the same time I find the stomach linings of a ruminant very beautiful. The honeycomb stomach, for example, has a fine ornamental structure that reminds me of an arabesques or the many-plies that looks a little like a wedding dress.

In many languages the word stomach and guts embody a second meaning: in German one says “aus dem Bauch heraus entscheiden” (to decide with ones stomach) that means an intuitive decision-making based on one's emotions and not a rational balanced choice. The French word for guts is “tripes”, so it is a common French expression to say: “laisser parler ses tripes”, which literally means to let your stomach speak or to express what is inside of you. In the old Russian the word “jivot” meant life, today the same word is used for the stomach.

To slit the stomach and cut it in four parts (rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum), to take out indigested weed, to turn the guts inside-out to stretch them, to dry them, and, finally, to cast them in precious porcelain is a brutal performance of exploitation that displays invisible and intimate ruminant stomachs as flat and injured but beautiful and delicate surfaces.