An artist in Denmark aims to raise awareness of the suffering caused by modern pig production with an art installation that opened Friday that includes three piglets who will be denied food and water and will starve to death.
Chilean-born Marco Evaristti is courting controversy to make a point about the treatment of pigs in Denmark, where about 25,000 piglets die daily as a result of the conditions in which they are bred.
The central exhibit at Copenhagen’s “And Now You Care” exhibition is a makeshift cage created with shopping carts containing three piglets. As the exhibition opened Friday evening, they were still fine, but they will not be given food and drink, and can be expected to die of hunger within a few days.
Evaristti says on his Instagram page that the exhibition “is a confrontation with Denmark’s bloody reality” in slaughterhouses, and that he urges people to reduce their meat consumption and support agriculture that improves animal welfare.
Denmark’s largest and oldest animal welfare organization, Animal Protection Denmark, says it is grateful for Evaristti’s interest in the problem, but disagrees with how he wants to convey it.
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“We completely understand the indignation” of the artist, said Birgitte Damm, a spokesperson for the organization. “But we do not agree that three piglets, three individual living beings, should be starved and prevented from drinking until they die from it. It is illegal and it is abuse of the animals.”
“The fact that happens to thousands each day in the industry doesn’t make it right,” she said. But she also praised the artist for asking “the large questions about who we are as human beings or want to be, and what we are doing to fellow creatures in the name of enormous amounts of mass-produced cheap meat.”
Damm explained that sows are bred in the Danish pig industry to produce about 20 piglets at a time, but only have 14 teats, forcing the piglets to compete for breastmilk, and leading to the starvation of many. She said some 25,000 piglets die every day from starvation or the result of the conditions in which they are held in Denmark.
It’s not Evaristti’s first controversial project.
One of his projects included goldfish in blenders, tempting viewers to press the button and create goldfish soup.
In 2006 he used some of his own body fat removed via liposuction to prepare meatballs, and then ate some of them.
He described that project called “Polpette Al Grasso Di Marco” as a critique on people overconsuming and then buying their way to slimness with liposuction, and at the same time an attempt to transcend the taboo of cannibalism.