Cattle as Ornament: textile art for the aesthetics of deforestation
Exhibition of six canvases made of conventional cotton buried with bovine meat, tie-dyed with rot, cleaned, painted with peppers, and hung on the walls like tablecloths
Activist Proposal for IIPPE Conference 2022
12th Annual Conference – International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE)
Category
(c) Activist proposal, documentary films, art projects
Project title
Cattle as ornament: textile art for the aesthetics of deforestation
Contact detail of the applicant
Luciana dos Santos Duarte
PhD researcher, International Institute of Social Studies
letswork@ethicalfashionbrazil.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciana-dos-santos-duarte-98329625/
Working Group
Environment
Short abstract of the proposal
Maximum 1500 characters (including punctuation and spaces). For documentary films and visual art projects, enter a link to your website, if possible.
This activist proposal for an art project consists of the exhibition of six canvases made of conventional cotton buried with bovine meat, tie-dyed with rot, cleaned, painted with peppers, and hung on the walls like tablecloths.
Conventional cotton is one of the most polluted crops in the world. It occupies 3% of the globe, uses 16% of all insecticides, and too much water in irrigation (e.g., it dried the Aral Sea). Together with polyester fibers, cotton represents 80% of all textiles for fashion. By being buried with bovine meat, using tie-dye knots to create textile patterns, the cotton canvas will be naturally died with bacteria, with rot. Having rotten meat as a dye, thus subverting the function of meat from nutrition to aesthetics, I want to highlight how unnecessary for our society is bovine meat, are cattle, the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Then, the textiles are cleaned, to kill the bacteria (to remove the natural workers who dyed the canvases). The aesthetics continue to be developed by using peppers as inks, ironically making the canvases more delicious, beautiful, and tasty to refined palates. Once dried, the six canvases are hung on the wall, like tablecloths that we cannot use, just admire.
In sum, deforestation from cattle and the environmental impact of fashion are synthesized in a mummification process of their main materials (meat and cotton). This artwork shows the beauty of perishing for nothing else than consumption choices.
Link for more information
https://whova.com/portal/registration/iippe_202209/
The IIPPE Conference and Local Committee
Satoshi Miyamura, Ourania Dimakou, Al Campbell, Alfredo Saad Filho, and Marco R. Di Tommaso
The Conference Local Partner
The Conference is organised in collaboration with CiMET (Italy’s National University Centre for Applied Economic Studies) and under the auspices of the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna.
