Baron’s latest installment of Death Book is a collaboration with artist Petr Davydtchenko, taking the form of an unconventional recipe book. It follows the artist on his journey from roadkill to restaurant, sourcing ingredients such as rats, snakes and eels to create gastronomical experiences as part of an ongoing reevaluation of cultural heritage. Filled with archival material, photographs, diary extracts and recipes, Davydtchenko’sDeath Cook Book is a manual for an alternative way of life; a counter-attack on modern consumer alienation and a model for living parallel to normative governmental and economic systems.

For his three-year piece, Go and Stop Progress (2016-2019), Davydtchenko survived living exclusively off roadkill. The death of animals due to automotive technology is reconfigured as having the potential for regeneration and prolonged life. Based in the south of France, he repetitively traversed the countryside looking for carcasses, which were checked for signs of disease and effectively prepared for storage and the table. The extensive archive, chronicling his day-to-day routine, is presented in Death Book alongside ingredient lists and meals such as fox soup.

Rat Race (2021) is an extension of Davydtchenko’s fixation on self-sustenance and commitment to a fringe urban existence. The work revolves around one particular playground in the city, which had become unusable by local children due to a rat infestation, making international news. He visited the city and, over time, worked with the local population to document, cook and eat the rats. Not only a form of population control, Davytdchenko created a transgression, when he presenting the dead vermin as an asset class. The photographic documentation of the rat skulls were tokenized on the blockchain, creating new value in an alternative, decentralized, financial system. In Death Book, the rat skulls are methodically presented in a formal visual language that becomes familiar throughout the book. In the same vein, referencing images from an autopsy and the criminal underworld, Davydtchenko meticulously photographs his tattoos. Three Michelin stars, for example, feed into a system of symbols and codes that speaks to the dark aspirations of this gastronomical practice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Davydtchenko’s self-administration of an alternative vaccine, PERFTORAN — which involved eating a live bat in front of the European Parliament — was designed as another parallel model of living away from his vision of a corrupt capitalist system. Reacting against pharmaceutical companies’ financial exploitation of the pandemic and the lack of publicly available vaccinations, the artist intended to offer a substitute for immunization beyond the work of corporations. Ingesting the animal alive was seen as the most ‘organic’ method of nutrition.

Throughout his practice, Davytdchenko has been refining his gastronomic offerings and learning from masters of their craft. Recently (2024) in Hong Kong, the artist invited others to partake in his work at the launch of his underground restaurant KHAM. Collaborating with renowned chefs and the famous Shia Wong Hip Snake restaurant in Kowloon, he elevated his culinary experiences within the walls of the exhibition space. The meals prepared by Davydtchenko during his residency resisted norms of acceptability and the Western exclusion of certain species from the dinner plate. From there he visited Vietnam and Thailand to learn at the source. By developing his practice to include more complex techniques, Davydtchenko now moves beyond the survival principle towards a subversive interplay between culturally specific delicacies. In an era of heightened awareness around ethical practices, Davydtchenko forces us to question our own moral boundaries in relation to what we advocate and what we eat.

Petr Davydtchenko (b.1986, Russia) is a multimedia conceptual and performance artist whose work explores themes around consumption, survival, waste, capitalism, and societal and environmental collapse. He has worked internationally, completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in London before living and working in France for several years. During that time, he cohabited with urban scavengers in the catacombs of Paris and subsisted off of rats and roadkill. His work has been the subject of shock, controversy, and even legal action, as he was detained by Brussels police following his live vaccination piece, PERFTORAN. He recently completed his residency at the Catalyst Gallery in Hong Kong, where he has exhibited past works and performance pieces while developing the recipes included in Death Book.

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