segunda-feira, 15 de abril de 2019

Artist wants to make America grate again, build U.S.-Mexico border wall of cheese

Dairy products are popular all over the world. In the United States, around 9% of all the milk produced by dairy farmers goes towards making ice cream. The list of dairy product we know and love is extensive, but most often for consuming rather than making a point.

Meet Los Angeles artist Cosimo Cavallaro. The artistic medium for his most recent project is cheese. Perhaps you've heard of President Trump's border wall initiative? You'd be hard pressed not to. Cavallaro seeks to install a border wall of his own, built entirely of expired bricks of cheese.

Online food delivery accounted for $4 billion of the $30 billion delivery market total in 2015, and Cavallaro is taking advantage of this by starting a GoFundMe campaign to get money to pay for the expired cheese. Sourcing his expired bricks of cotija cheese from several different distributors, each cheese brick costs $100. His goal is to raise enough money to build a wall that's 25 feet high and 1,000 feet long. Thus far, he has enough to make a 25-foot wall made of 200 cheese bricks. Why all this?

"He was inspired to start the Cheese Wall because of the political environment we are living in today...If it takes a Cheese Wall at the border to make people look at the 'wall' in a different way, that's what Cosimo will create," the GoFundMe page states.

His aim is to get people talking. Cavallaro adds that there's an inherent bit of humor in the project because people will immediately see waste. What he wants people to ask themselves is that if they can see waste in a wall of cheese, how they might not see waste in an actual border wall with a $10 billion price tag. Cavallaro himself is no stranger to using perishable goods as a medium, but this is his biggest project yet.

Some of the 66% of people who said craft cocktails and spirits would be a hot trend in 2018 didn't think about food as an artistic medium for protest and thought provocation. Where these expired bricks of cheese would usually be discarded, they're serving a greater purpose in an important conversation.

"This wall is a documentation of our times. This is a moment that we're talking about an issue, about walls. I think it's very important that artists create something that lasts in our time to see what's happening," Cavallaro said when announcing the cheese wall.

The length of the cheese wall depends on the people who support the project. From the GoFundMe page to his website selling all sorts of cheesy apparel, there are multiple ways to show support. Our favorites, because you can't beat a good food based pun, are the shirts that say and imply Make America Grate Again.

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