Henotopia: A Proposal

PLACE: that borderline state between dream and reality, where you feel as though you’re (re)living a moment from the past. The threshold where you feel half-awake, yet still somehow anchored within the dreamworld. The hypnopompic state, where logic slowly begins to reactivate, but all sensory data (the context) is still mediated by the mechanisms of sleep, in which external stimuli intertwine with memory.

SLEEP: I sleep a lot. Exaggeratedly so. Sometimes it feels as though I won’t ever be able to wake up. But then, in the minutes after I open my eyes, I get taken over by a weird déjà vu. My perception becomes distorted; I no longer feel like I am in my studio apartment in Bucharest, but back home at my grandparents' house. Those late mornings when the sun beats down intensely, and I refuse to wake up. The smell of fresh air drifting through the cracked door, the racket of the animals outside, the woollen blanket on the bed, regardless of the season. For a moment, I feel physically transported to that specific locus of my childhood. I know it’s an illusion, yet it seems so real that I inadvertently want to stretch the moment, to feel, not only imagine, life restarting from that exact point.

Strangely, this exact sensation resurfaces whenever I encounter certain animals, creatures that were an integral part of my childhood, companion species that stayed by my side whenever I was left alone at home. I didn't just grow up around cats and dogs... I grew up around chickens.

CHICKENS: which, by the way, are going to save us from Bill Gates. But more on that later.

HISTORY: ever since I was little, before I could even speak clearly, I was magnetically drawn to chicks. So small, fluffy, and erratically running around while peeping continuously, exactly like the Susuwatari in Spirited Away. I was always pestering my grandmother to bring me the tiniest of chicks, for me to cuddle with. Incidentally, earning her the lifelong nickname "Mama Micii" (Mother of the Little Ones). I had a pink hat with a sunflower on the back, and I would use it to carry around chicks. They were only a few days old.

CUTE AGGRESSION: "the urge some people get to squeeze, crush, or bite cute things, albeit without any desire to cause harm" (Stavropoulos and Alba 2018).

FEAR: I can still vividly recall the intense anxiety I felt when predators appeared, most often hawks, ferrets, or foxes. I was about four years old when I noticed a wide gap between the fence palings and the coop. Some of the smaller hens would constantly squeeze through, and if I didn't pull them out, there was a high chance a ferret might catch them. I squeezed myself into that tight space, managed to grab the hen, and felt exactly like those heroic firefighters you see on the news saving lives. Not long after that episode, my grandmother told me that the ferret had slipped through a hole and slaughtered them all.

MAMA MICII: my grandmother and I used to sit and talk on the phone for hours, gossiping about them as if they were people. “Yes, and that speckled one is so fat she can barely walk; the rooster chases her constantly. Poor thing! But the crested one is so beautiful, even if she lays such tiny eggs.” We could talk endlessly.

In the evenings, I would even bring Suzica, a speckled hen with a little crest, inside the house, and we would cuddle until almost asleep. She was the most well-behaved hen; she made no noise and would just loaf in my arms while we watched telenovelas on Acasă TV. I was too young to be able to read the subtitles, so my grandmother had to read them out loud to me.

PERFECT SLEEP: there was a sofa next to the stove where I always fell asleep. In the winter, when the stove radiated that deep heat.

DEATH: one particular night still haunts me. The night when I felt my grandmother’s chest at its warmest. We had adopted a guinea fowl, which was too fragile to adapt to the other ones. By evening, the chick was nearly cold. I stayed up all night with my grandmother, gently blowing warm air over it, trying to revive it. Being so close to her, I could feel the heat emanating from her body, her unmistakable scent. I listened to her voice recounting memories until it all dissolved into a dream. In the morning, the chick was dead. I sat on the sofa and stared at its body. Years later, on that very same sofa, I would look at my grandmother’s chest, inert and cold.

Space undergoes a radical mutation when the person inhabiting it disappears, when the presence that lived there is extinguished. A place that just a few years prior vibrated with energy becomes inert, emptied of all meaning.

CONSPIRACY: there is a conspiracy theory currently circulating online claiming that laboratories funded by Bill Gates are producing synthetic ticks that trigger Alpha-Gal Syndrome. The alleged motive behind this biopolitical manoeuvre is to manufacture demand for new vaccines (Schetters et al. 2016). Consequently, many people from online homesteading communities are stating they want to invest in chickens because of the lesser-known fact that a single chicken can consume around 331 ticks a day. Cases have emerged globally where these ticks kill wildlife; I’ve seen footage of an elk completely overwhelmed and killed by hundreds of them. These specific ticks are distinguished by a white dot on their back, the lone star tick, which causes the aforementioned meat allergy.

FLAT BRAIN: Werner Herzog famously claimed about chickens that “the enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity, is just overwhelming. You have to do yourself a favour when you’re out in the countryside, and you see a chicken. Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. By the way, it’s very easy to hypnotise a chicken; they are very prone to hypnosis, and in one or two films I have actually shown that” (2005).

Chickens have been systematically discredited, deemed stupid, and reduced to mere instruments of mass production. Rigorous cognitive studies prove the exact opposite: “Relative to their initial perceptions of chickens as slow learners, the students’ attitudes shifted to viewing them as intelligent and emotional animals with individual personalities” (Marino 2017). See also Hen (György Pálfi 2025).

HENOTOPIA: A world where chickens are ubiquitous, visible everywhere, appreciated, and even revered.

POST-CHICKEN STUDIES: new critical frameworks regarding the avian. In posthumanist theories, such as those pioneered by Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti, the Anthropocentric model is dismantled; the human is decentered, and the focus shifts to co-evolving "companion species". In the post-chicken framework I propose, the chicken ceases to be defined through the paradigm of traditional poultry farming and industrial exploitation, becoming an agent of biosecurity in a world threatened by Alpha-Gal Syndrome.

From this theoretical framework, we can derive several crucial concepts like Systemic Gallinophilia, where the structural transition from intensive avian exploitation to urban symbiosis and Extended Non-Human Subjectivity, the recognition of a gallinaceous vigilance network acting as a planetary defence system, reconfiguring posthuman notions of bacterial and technological networks.

Furthermore, we can map out the post-chicken condition, drawing a direct parallel to the posthuman condition. Rosi Braidotti describes the posthuman condition as a state where the human becomes a hybrid link interconnected with technology and nature. Conversely, the post-chicken condition dictates a reality where human survival depends entirely on henotopic immunity, meaning how thoroughly protected you are by your local avian network. This gives rise to cyberhenic agency, which represents the capacity of the chicken to act, influence, decode, and modify urban and social systems through a bio-technological symbiosis. The chicken is no longer a passive biological sensor; it becomes a co-designer of the new smart city; it dictates data streams and the spatial movement of human populations.

This symbiosis triggers psychological mutations, such as hypnopompic synchronisation. In this state, humans no longer regulate their circadian rhythms using mechanical alarm clocks, but rather tune themselves to the city's cyber-avian acoustic network, which heralds the optimal state of local bio-safety at dawn.

SPECULATIVE TURN: there are many more theories to be hatched here, particularly those gestated from lived experience.

WISHFUL THINKING: even if we are not eventually overrun by a wave of laboratory-engineered ticks (duh!), I still yearn for a society that protects all animals. They must be allowed to live the lives they were put on this earth to experience, not trapped in labs and industrial warehouses undergoing genetic mutations, but in absolute freedom.