Sweet Dreams
“This isn’t the food business, Ricky. This is the desire business. We’re manufacturing dreams!”
In Sweet Dreams, created by Marshmallow Laser Feast for Manchester’s Factory International, we join the Real Good Chicken company and its mascot, Chicky Ricky, at a time when tastes are changing. The company’s future, and Ricky’s, hangs in the balance. Ricky is forced to engage with the strange modern world of food and try to find a new place within it. To some extent, we’re all on this path, trying to navigate an increasingly loud and extreme landscape where food is becoming more processed, more expensive and more excessive. Where the margins of socially acceptable consumption have widened.
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. But 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. Much like Ricky, we’re all on the conveyor belt.
Commissioned by Factory International, developed and funded by the BFI’s Filmmaking Fund and created in collaboration with award-winning writer and former chef Simon Wroe, Sweet Dreams wraps big questions about how and what we consume into a comic pop package.
Marshmallow Laser Feast is a London-based experiential artist collective that collaborates with specialists in all disciplines—from coders to poets, chemists to ventriloquists, brands to institutions. The group tells stories that untangle, entangle and flavor our reality, blurring the lines between art, immersive experiences, XR and film. Its work is grounded in research and designed to expose, explore and expand our relationship with the living world.
IN THE MEDIA
“Sweet Dreams is centred on the story of fictional fast food brand the Real Good Chicken Company and its long-standing mascot Chicky Ricky, a cartoon character drawn by French artist McBess and voiced by actor and comedian Munya Chawawa. The brand is facing a crisis as customers turn away from cheap fast food in search of healthier and more sustainable options. Spread over several rooms in one of Aviva Studios’ vast spaces, visitors to Sweet Dreams are taken on a journey through the company’s history, where we learn of the various corporate crises it has faced. . . .
“Sweet Dreams is funny, though as a piece of corporate satire, the whole experience is painfully on the nose, taking in how brands use mascots to beguile kids despite health concerns — ‘My smiley face says, ‘it’s alright, you can eat this!’ chirps Chicky Ricky — and the deeper problems inherent in capitalism. . . .
“An extra level of nuance is brought to the piece by the discovery that you can buy various pieces of Real Good Chicken Company merch in the gallery foyer. So while you might emerge blinking from the installation in despair at the manipulative nature of corporations, brands, and marketers, it’s hard to resist going on to spread the brand’s message yourself via a beautifully designed tote bag.”
—Creative Review
