Tenebrae

VIDEO · 2008

A video work of a pig slaughter by some farmers in Portugal. It is an activity hundreds if not thousands of years old.

The title "Tenebrae" means "darkness" or "shadows" and is taken from the mournful work by Carlo Gesualdo written as penance after he killed his wife in a crime of passion. A reworked version of this piece is part of the audio for the work which helps to make the gorier activities be interpreted as pagan ritual. Farmers in Portugal are not allowed to kill their own pigs domestically, that is, outside of official slaughterhouses although they do so and divide the meat among their families. This is why their faces are not shown, but also to heighten the activity which took place early one morning in a farm on a hill in Portugal in winter. The work is intended to foreground the sacrificial, ritualistic quality of slaughter that is as dates back even before homo sapiens.