Pig Response Project
curatorial, performance, ceremony, writing, poetry, collage, podcastin collaboration with: Elliot Hurst, just wondering…. , Adrian Feener, Maria Sledmere, James Bowen
featured in: UNFIX, Uroboros
2019-2021
About
In November 2018 Elliot asked me if I’ve heard of the African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) raging in China and millions of pigs dying either because of the virus or are being culled to prevent its spread. I hadn’t heard about it at the time, but learning more about the virus and the pigs we thought pigs were not okay and “the global losses to the protein market” was no good language to speak about mass deaths. We wondered what would a commemoration of pigs’ deaths look like in a world where pigs’ lives mattered? And so we started the Pig Response Project.The Pig Response Project combined performance, photography, audio works, research and field explorations. Our interest in the politics of mourning took on extra resonance as COVID-19 swept through our own species-world shortly after this project began.
Where are the pigs? African Swine Fever in Deadly Assemblages
watch
Writers & Narrators — Iryna Zamuruieva & Elliot Hurst
Director, Editor, Animator — Aron Nor
Art Director & Illustrator — Mina Mimosa
Music Composer — Adrian Feener
Script Editor — M. Martelli
production — just wondering….
This is an exploration and commemoration of a deadly pig pandemic and the lives it touched. It’s created by humans who believe it is important to find ways to respond to this catastrophe.
Pig Response Project Universe
dive in
In the spirit of making research process transparent we’re sharing publicly our working board where we’ve been assembling various story threads. We are inspired by Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. There are no neat stories to tell here and the pig suffering is enmeshed with the hamburger, the Boeing that carried the virus overseas, the fence that attempted to stop the spread, the grave that was never built, the agrilogistics, the golden pig statue, the revenue made and lost.
The many threads come together and fall apart. We tied some knots and untied the other. Please join us in trying to practice more careful human-pig relations.
Pig Mourning Ceremony
UNFIX, 2021
Uroboros Festival (with Maria Sledmere), 2021
We convened a mourning ceremony for pigs that have died as a result of the African Swine Fever (ASF) pandemic. In the past two years over 100 million pigs have either lost their lives directly due to the virus or been killed as part of virus suppression efforts. The ceremony was held for people to join the ceremony as fellow mourners, not observers.
The ceremony was a way to embody our research and enact, together with others, a socioecological imaginary where the question of living and dying well is extended to our porcine relations. Our multispecies thinking is inspired by the knotted approaches of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others. Philosopher Judith Butler helps us to think through the importance of mourning as a social and political act, as well as a profoundly embodied one. Inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff alerts us to the need for ethics and response-ability at a distance. As migrants, we've already been practicing this. Both of us have mourned human (and non human) family members, while being far away from them. We are also moved by the knowledge that grief and mourning are practices that we share with pigs and other animals.
Antiviral Pig Pod
listen
Antiviral pig pod is a podcast of the Pig Response Project. Looking at pigs, African swine fever virus and the ecologies of human-pig relations
We how humans commemorate pigs and other creatures, colonial legacies shaping pig worlds and pig mobilities, coping with loss.
First episode: we discuss the fact that pigs are sick and how are we responding
Second episode: we explore pig and virus mobilites. Acorns, drones, fences and ham sandwiches. How do these relate to pig and virus movements?
Third episode: we ask how do things become killable? What are the stories that frame culling? In this episode we are talking about pigs' death and the ethics of killing.
Fourth episode: together with a historian Dr James Bowen we discuss cattle plague memorials, remembering animal lives lost & ways of doing so that unfold better ecological futures