Pig Mourning Ceremony
You are invited to a mourning ceremony for millions of pigs that have died as a result of the African Swine Fever (ASF) pandemic. Troubled times require practices that attune us to the naturecultures we are entangled with. Through collective remembrance we will enact response-ability to this porcine crisis.
13:00 CEST
We are convening a mourning ceremony for pigs that have died as a result of the African Swine Fever (ASF) pandemic. In the past two years, as this pandemic spread through East Asia and Europe, well over 100 million pigs have either lost their lives directly due to the virus or been killed as part of virus suppression efforts. The exact number will never be known. Our session will navigate cultural practices of memorial and ritual, to craft a mo(nu)ment to these pigs and their relations.
This ceremony is part of the ????PIG RESPONSE PROJECT????, a curatorial initiative for practicing careful pig-human relations. It has been set up in response to the ASF pandemic affecting pigs all over the globe and works as ever-branching-off space for artistic, empathetic, research, down-to-earth porcine speculation?. This response structure connects art, research and design, in an attempt to adequately respond to the loss of life as a result of the ongoing African Swine Fever pandemic. The mourning ceremony, held as part of Uroboros, enacts a social imaginary where the question of living and dying well is extended to our porcine relations.
Troubled times require not only utopian design visions but also the practices that allow us to properly attune ourselves to the naturecultures we are all entangled with, with all their harm and violence. This may seem like a dark vision of the theme of ‘feral creative practices’ but that is how we understand troubling times, we need to find ways to become response-able to the things that trouble and unsettle us.
In holding this ceremony, we hope to connect as fellow mourners, not observers. How to participate is up to each fellow creature. There will be space for remembering personal pig encounters; just being present in the space is also fine. We aim to gently draw you into a collective project of multispecies mourning.
???? Please note that this event will NOT be recorded or streamed, the setting is meant to be intimate.
Iryna Zamuruieva / Elliot Hurst
Iryna Zamuruieva is an artist and cultural geographer. She works and walks across socially/ecologically engaged arts, co-creating experimental spaces for engaging with the more-than-human worlds. Most recently she's been working on community led climate change adaptation in Scotland and investigating transformational creative practices (with a sustainability knowledge broker Sniffer), exploring non-hierarchical care structures (with Autonomous Care Unit collective) and curating a response structure for practicing careful pig-human relations (with the Pig Response Project). On occasion, Iryna can also be found writing, curating and photographing. Originally from a town in the middle of the Ukrainian steppe, Iryna is now living and working by the Scottish part of the North Sea coast.
Elliot Hurst is a researcher and facilitator, committed to multispecies anticolonial justice, and finding (expanding) the cracks in racist, capitalist patriarchal hegemony. His academic research focuses on water as a connective fluid sustaining social and ecological worlds. He is interested in creative research practices that engage in speculative world-making. Elliot grew up on a small farm in Aotearoa/New Zealand, on stolen Ngati Awa land, amongst ponds, sheep, cows, trees, eels etc. He is also involved in climate justice struggles and loves swimming, piano playing and food making.