WHAT?

Pink Chicken Project suggests using a “Gene Drive” to change the colour of the entire species Gallus gallus Domesticus to pink.

Being the world's most common bird, the bones of the 60 billion chickens that are killed every year leave a distinct trace in the rock strata (the earth's crust), a marker for the new geological age - the Anthropocene.

To re-occupy this identifier of our age, the project suggests genetically modifying a chicken with pink bones and feathers, using a gene from the insect cochineal to produce a pigment that will be fossilized when combined with the calcium of the bone.

Spreading this gene with the recently invented Gene Drive technique, the species could be permanently altered, on a global scale, in just a few years.

Thereby modifying the future fossil record, colouring the geological trace of humankind, pink!

Pink, is a symbolic color, an opposition to the current global power dynamics, that enable and aggravate the anthropocentric violence forced upon the non-human world.

The pink chicken DNA also carries an encoded message, that calls for an ecological discourse that must include issues of social justice, in order to achieve the radical restructuring of society needed to break the death grip of the sixth extinction.

Lying somewhere between utopia and dystopia, the project attempts to redirect focus to the underlying ethical and political issues;

What future do we really want, and why?