PIZZAG8 is a series of late-night, bar-like exhibitions organized by PCNC_BAY x BLUNT x SKENSVED. A place for social gathering, a venue for exchange, and a roving project based on a common cross-cultural icon.

It is impossible to escape the rampant popularity of pizza. From Claes Oldenburg’s “Pizza Palette” to Macaulay Culkin’s “Pizza Underground,” pizza is almost as big as the internet itself. The global pizza-eating average is 350 slices per second. The round shape flashes at us in the form of badly-made gifs, makes us salivate with hunger on Instagram and plays an important role in movies and TV shows. It frequently reveals its soft side in a cameo at a birthday party or joins us on the corner after the club in its most trashy sliced state. It is a fast food, a frozen food, a diet food and a culinary delicacy baked into one and a super meme of our time. Pizza is a cultural icon so deeply steeped in innovation and tradition that hardly anything can compete. Because pizza is so easily loved, shared and re-invented, it also serves as a widely-used metaphor and symbol, endlessly appropriated to uphold cultural norms. No wonder that pizza has become a philosophical and social mode, rather than simply a culinary treat. Today, it is a universal, omnipresent, truly globalized and networked concept – a cultural fact that provides an extraordinarily large canvas for cultural expression and manifold projections in both the digital and the non-digital. Pizza is so native to the Internet that it even became the protagonist of the first transactional website.

With the title PIZZAG8, the installation makes reference to the much-discussed online #pizzagate scandal, a “fake news” item that circulated on social media and shook the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Used as a vehicle for the show concept, it indirectly points towards the power of the internet meme.

– From “The Pizza Reader” by Alain Bieber, Konstanze Schütze, and Ella Tetrault.

PIZZAG8:BURNOUT took place on March 31, 2018 at ÆTHER in Sofia, Bulgaria, with CYBERIAN, FLÖKOSH & V3STA