Nicola Twilley
Author of Edible Geography; former Food Editor
- January 19, 2011 • 6:30 pm PST
- + responses
00:00/00:0000:00
As Brisbane, Australia, experienced floods of up to fourteen feet last week, one guy decided to make a video of himself canoeing into his local McDonald's. At just under one minute long, and accompanied by a peculiar but hypnotic song about fish heads, it's not only strange, but strangely similar to this video of a flooded McDonald's, by Danish art collective Superflex.
Although my otherwise useless training as an art historian equips me to write at least twenty double-spaced pages on the unexpected convergences and illuminating details shared by the two, I will spare you. But I am interested in the appeal of both videos as evidence of a collective and deep-seated urban flood fantasy—the legacy of our fishy forebears, perhaps, or the release valve for a shared, repressed anxiety about the post-natural hubris of asphalt and concrete in which we live?
