- Time: 2024
Night at the Factory Farm is a journey through the spaces and surroundings of industrial animal agriculture. The lecture-performance guides the audience through a digital model of a Brandenburg factory farm, based on LiDAR and photogrammetry data collected by activists. The lecture is structured according to the spatial arrangement, encounters described by activists, and speculative fiction surrounding objects and other more-than-human lifeforms at the site. It interrogates the complex porosity of factory farms and examines how these ostensibly sealed environments are continually traversed by diverse actors such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, wild animals, and even the resistant behaviors of the farmed animals themselves. In the red gleam of an activists’ headlamp the factory farm appears as a complex interior ecosystem—a fragile, interconnected space of various lifeforms and machines, always teetering on the edge of catastrophe. By rendering visible their hidden interiors, the project aims at dissolving its barriers through digital means and thus foster critical engagement with these spaces of production and confinement, typically underrepresented in academic and artistic discourse.
The text is based on the video game installation deprofundis.exe (2023) developed by Pascal Marcel Dreier for his solo exhibition at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen curated by Leoni Fischer.
This work premiered at Interior Ecologies, international online symposium organized by MAIA, Master of Arts in Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the Institute of Postnatural Studies. Watch the recording here