YOSHUA OKÓN

Freedom Fries includes a single channel video installation, a  sculpture and two photographic tryptichs. For this piece, Okón convinced both a McDonald's manager to grant him access for an overnight shoot and a McDonald's loyal customer to participate as a model. The resulting work references the way in which the body is tricked and, above all, dehumanized by the corporate environment. In this sense, the site itself acquires a symbolic nature: McDonald's, as a representative of corporate culture, references the way in which "consumer society" alienates the human body. In Freedom Fries the obese body becomes the evidence of a neoliberal system which ideology promotes an idea of freedom based on disproportionate consumption and the continuos promotion of low self-esteem. In such a context, the work points out the irony of how, in the name of Freedom, we have become prisoners of our own bodies. Freedom Fries documents the consequences of an economic and political system that has eroded our agency so deeply that we have lost not only the connection with other species and other human beings, but we have also become alienated from our own corporality.