A project by Mariella Weiss and Theresa Bader
We don’t ask you to stop eating meat, we want you to eat meat with awareness and respect! Because mass production has to be stopped!
A project within the Master in Eco-social Design, inspired by the annual theme ESSEN/ALIMENTARE/FOOD (Project 1 - WS 2015/16)
Supervisors
Partners
Special thanks to
Animal - Dead - Meat, to activate this chain of associations, we organised a happening with 11 participants and three chickens. After having a first, short contact and giving them names, three of the attendees decided to slaughter those individuals, prepare them for cooking, to finally eat them. During the whole process, they treated them with respect and dignity. A film shows the emotions of the participants about the brutal act of the meat production and places those pictures on eye-level with the portraits of the chicken. The festive dinner that followed, is also paramount.
We think, bringing those concessions from the private happening into open and public space, will help to start a rethinking in the production and consumption of meat and be a step towards an environment without industrial livestock farming.
In the theory of Martha Nussbaum, “the good life”, she says, that feelings and moral actions are linked. The emotionality and the rationality are relating and depending on each other.
“Ich habe dabei realisiert, dass das Selbst-Schlachten und anschließende Essen des Tieres eine reflexive, bewusste und kausale Handlung ist. Es wurde dabei eine Ebene wieder eingeblendet, nämlich dass ein Lebewesen sein Leben lassen muss, weil wir Fleisch essen wollen, die sonst ausgeblendet oder einfach vergessen wird. Und mehr noch, das Selbst-Schlachten ist immediat und assoziativ, ein starker Moment wurde kreiert, der alle Beteiligten mit dem Huhn, dem Ort und der Landschaft in Verbindung gebracht hat.”
Moritz Bonatti - Participant
Martha Nussbaum's capability approach, the good life, leaded us trough our project.
(Martha Nussbaum, Capability Approach)