Art Farm Revisited
Sin Kabeza Productions
2012 

In 2004 Belgian artist Wim Delvoye inaugurated »Art Farm«, a biological art project where pigs were tattooed in a farming village on the outskirts of Beijing, China. At the beginning of the project s development Delvoye claimed that the pigs would be saved from the slaughterhouse to become living art. But by the end of 2005, the pigs were slaughtered and transformed into art objects, their skins and bodies exhibited and sold in prestigious contemporary art institutions.
Highlighting behind the scenes footage filmed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares between 2004 and 2005 this documentary revisits »Art Farm« with a critical lens. Cheto Castellano, who was one of the tatooers, becomes the film s primary interlocutor, providing an emotive critique of Art Farm s failures and its production of a colonial gaze, while implicitly critiquing the white privilege and neoliberal commodification present within the art-culture system. Editor Roberto Meza affectively organizes this archive of primary footage to uncover »Art Farm« s social life, concentrating on the relationships built amongst pigs and workers while raising important questions about multispecies ethics and the consequences of treating pigs as commodities in the contemporary art market. This film is dedicated to the pigs who worked and died on Art Farm.

 

Art Farm Revisited (2012) (HD: 23:00)
Directed by Roberto Meza, Cheto Castellano & Lissette Olivares
Filmed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares
Genre: Documentary, Multispecies Activism, Anthrozoology, Art-Culture Institutional Critique