Art farm spectacle (teaser).m4v
Channel: Cheto Castellano
Date: 2012-09-11

Art Farm Revisited (2012)
23:00

Directed by Roberto Meza, Lissette Olivares, & Cheto Castellano
Filmed by Cheto Castellano and Lissette Olivares 
Sin Kabeza Productions

In 2004 Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, Inc. inaugurated Art Farm (Yishu Nongchang) 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 and experimental approach to multispecies ethnography revisits Art Farm with a critical lens. Cheto Castellano becomes the film's primary interlocutor, providing an emotive critique of Art Farm's failure, its production of a colonial gaze, while implicitly critiquing white privilege and the 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 died on Art Farm.