Death Book by Petr Davydtchenko

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’s Death 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.

Petr Davydtchenko is a Russian-born conceptual artist whose work centers on survival, consumption, and the collapse of societal norms. Over the past decade, he’s lived off roadkill, eaten rats from infested city playgrounds, and ingested a live bat in front of the European Parliament as a protest against Big Pharma. His long-term project Death Book documents these radical acts — from fox soup to blockchain-tokenized rat skulls — presenting them as challenges to capitalist food systems and moral taboos. Recently, through collaborations with chefs and underground restaurants in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand, he has evolved his practice from raw survival to a subversive form of fine dining. Davydtchenko confronts viewers with uncomfortable truths about what we consider edible, ethical, or acceptable — forcing us to question the limits of our own values.