SWEET DREAMS
Sweet Dreams, which launched in 2024 at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, is centred around a hypothetical fast-food chain called the Real Good Chicken Company and the adventures of its mascot Chicky Ricky. Across six rooms, we see the fictional brand’s history – from golden era to its eventual collapse – across a multi-sensory exploration of appetite, desire and the food industry.
Sweet Dreams emerged from a fascination with the weirdness of food culture, with the dualities and hypocrisies and little self-justifying sweeteners we apply when it comes to food. As a species, we’ve never been more conscious of our connection to the natural world and the moral entanglement of our eating habits. At the same time, we live in a golden age of consumerism: never has so much been available to so many. Food is a status symbol, a social signifier, a reflection of our identities. Deeper down, it’s something that speaks to our lizard brains, to that pleasure principle always humming in each of us, our debt to desire.
Over the years, food companies and consumers have found ways to bridge these conflicting positions, perhaps the strangest of which is the food mascot, the smiling cartoon chicken between us and the plate of chicken which implies it approves of our eating it. It’s ridiculous. It’s grotesque. It works like a charm.
How we feel about food today speaks to a wider sense – and a deepening suspicion – that modern life is artificial, unsustainable, and not necessarily giving us what we need. There are no easy answers. Whatever choice some of us might have is complicated, and many have no choice at all. When it comes to food, large-scale co-operatives and multinationals shape not only our realities but our desires. We've been consuming other people's dreams so long it's hard to know what our own wishes are. Like our feathered friend Ricky, there's much we can't control. We’re all on the conveyor belt, but we might yet take back our dreams.
The question is: what do we want? What do our sweet dreams look like?