Presteren, groeien, wachten. Over de (on)zichtbaarheid van geweld in de Nederlandse varkensindustrie

Abstract

In the Dutch pork industry, ‘fattening pigs’ spend four months of their six-month lives in bare concrete pens. This essay describes the media landscape and infrastructure within which those four months become known to a human audience, from legislation to pen design and from promotional campaigns to activist videos. We discern a representational regime that renders invisible the cognitively complex and temporally extended suffering of pigs, and with it the violence of the pig industry. Parallel to the text is a series of photographs in which we experiment with alternative representations of pig lives. Finally, we propose to see that pigs are waiting – as a recognition of the kinship we share with them and as an openness to difference.