Zoonotic Undemocracy* - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Zoonotic Undemocracy*

ARNAUD GERSPACHER

En 1967, the Brazilian artist Nelson Leirner balked at the confining of a
large dead pig to a gestation crate in the fourth Modern Art Salon of Brasília.
He called out the curators, Frederico Morais and Mário Pedrosa, in the press,
questioning what possible criteria they had for admitting such a monstrosity.
The work was titled The Pig (O porco, 1967) and had been submitted by none
other than Leirner himself. For the art historian Claudia Calirman, the interest
here involves a Duchampian reversal: Rather than defend a non-art object
excluded from display in the interest of unsettling art-world conventions,
Leirner resisted the successful inclusion of his readymade animal so as to ques-
tion a definition of art that had become so expanded as to accommodate just
about anything.1 While this interpretation is compelling as an account of the
Brazilian reception of the readymade, coming to terms with the exploitive condi-
tions embodied by the pig in The Pig is a more urgent matter, given that these
conditions have involved widespread human and nonhuman suffering, environ-
mental violence, and deadly epidemics and pandemics.

Leaving aside the question of whether a sentient animal with personality and
memory can ever truly be a readymade in the same way as a bicycle wheel or uri-

*
I would like to thank Hal Foster for his helpful and incisive feedback on this text. I am also
grateful for Adam Lehner’s many valuable comments and suggestions. Thanks to Debra Riley Parr and
Deirdre Madeleine Smith for reading an earlier version of this essay. A portion of this text was present-
ed on the panel titled “‘Our Ancestor Was an Animal That Breathed Water’/Non-Human Beings and
Art of the Anthropocene” at the College Art Association annual conference in 2021.

1.
Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo
Meireles (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke University Press, 2012), pag. 20. The debate over aesthetic standards
between Leirner and the curators occurred against a wider sociopolitical backdrop of violence and cen-
sorship by the military dictatorship beginning in the 1960s. Calirman argues compellingly that the
readymade and the whims of the military dictatorship shared common ground in their arbitrariness
and lack of clearly defined rules—the first as deregulatory aesthetic freedom, the second as regulatory
sociopolitical unfreedom. I would further argue that the pig in Leirner’s work embodies both at once:
the artist’s freedom in transvaluing an animal into an art object, Por un lado, and the regimenting
of the animal in a crate on the other. Además, as I will argue in this essay, industrial commodification
is responsible for the normalization of violence that facilitates reducing nonhuman animal bodies to
purportedly identical readymade units, a practice of intensive animal agriculture that should be seen as
an integral part of repressive and undemocratic social, económico, and political power.

OCTUBRE 181 Verano 2022, páginas. 61–92. © 2022 Revista Octubre, Limitado. y el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00466

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Nelson Leirner. The Pig. 1967.

nal, what is increasingly clear from our vantage point today is that the treatment of
nonhuman animals as de facto industrial readymades has reached a critical
phase—ethically, politically, and ecologically. Leirner’s work revealed the rich
Brazilian legacy of antropofagia to be double-edged. Inaugurated by the modernist
poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” in 1928, the term refers to the
cultural ingestion of European traditions, like the readymade, in such a way that
they are incorporated into an anticolonial identity. The Pig, sin embargo, points to the
possibility of anthropophagic indigestion in the harm caused by adopting European
and US styles of instrumentalizing nonhuman animals.2 If the Brazilian avant-
gardes turned to the standardized language of the readymade in art, then Brazil’s

2.
Having adopted European and US styles of meat production—with the accompanying envi-
ronmental, social, and political ills—Brazil is now home to the world’s largest meat company, JBS. El
company was founded by José Batista Sobrinho in 1953 in Anápolis as a modestly sized slaughterhouse.
Shortly thereafter, the modernist construction of Brasília, with its burgeoning labor force, opened a
new market for Sobrinho’s operation, allowing the company to expand considerably. His sons, Joesley
and Wesley Batista, now co-own the parent company, j&F Investments. They have allegedly been
involved in high-profile corruption in Brazil, having been accused of bribery in 2016 and of paying off
food-sanitation inspectors in 2017. That same year, a conversation between Joesley and then-president
Michel Temer was secretly recorded and leaked, exposing widespread corruption between Big Meat
and government officials in Brazil. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/
swashbuckling-meat-tycoons-nearly-brought-down-a-government-brazil (accedido 3/2/2021).

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

political and financial classes did the same with regard to the standardization of
animal bodies in the meat industry, with disastrous consequences for the planet.

Brazilian animal agribusiness belongs to a broader ecopolitical history of
domestication, therio-biopower (es decir., the “making live” of certain species and “let-
ting die” of others; “therio-,” designating animality, points to the regimentation of
nonhuman bodies for power, broadening Michel Foucault’s biopolitics beyond the
humano), and the always porous, unstable, and evolving understanding of the
human-animal divide that suffuses our politics of sovereignty.3 From plundering
pastoral nomads in Eurasia millennia ago to today’s multinational corporations
controlling the nearly trillion-dollar animal-industrial complex, those deploying
nonhuman animals as weapons for land and wealth accumulation have wielded
considerable power over innumerable human and nonhuman lives. Histories of
colonialism, neocolonialism, and anti-democratic authoritarianism have been, en
part, carved out of nonhuman bodies. In this respect, it is little surprise that the
current authoritarian president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, touts his “bancadas de
bíblia, bói, e bala”—senate seats filled with Bibles, beef, and bullets. This allitera-
tive trinity of zealotry, cattle, and violence unabashedly evokes a history of multi-
species colonialist and neocolonialist brutality that continues to inflict harm on
the environment and on democratic values in Brazil and beyond.

With this ecopolitical history in mind, I will stay in the Brazilian context and
focus on a specific visual document, Wilson Coutinho’s short film Cildo Meireles of
1979.4 The film is remarkable for its prescient attention to nonhuman animals in
the political aesthetics of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s work. Coutinho mixes
archival footage—scenes from protests against the military dictatorship, a chicken-
disassembly line, a Coca-Cola production plant, nineteenth-century colonialist
prints, and John Wayne in Howard Hawks’s film El Dorado (1966)—with documen-
tation of Meireles’s installations from the 1960s and ’70s. In this way, the film is
both an art-critical retrospective of Meireles’s work and an avant-garde artwork in
its own right. In the reception of the film, the Wayne sequences—in which
Coutinho détourned the film’s audio with an alternative voice track that made it
seem as if the actor who most emphatically embodied the US frontier mentality
was critiquing the doctrine of manifest destiny—have received the most attention
thus far, with the suggestion that Coutinho does to the ideological circuitry of
Hollywood what Meireles had done to Coca-Cola in his well-known Insertions into
Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (Inserções em cirucuitos ideolgoicos: Projeto Coca-
Cola, 1970). What is less often noted is the role nonhuman animals play in

3.
For an analysis of the role of nonhuman animals in biopolitics, see Cary Wolfe, Before the Law:
Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Sobre el
question of nonhuman animals and their role in the history of Western political philosophy, ver
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign. Volumen 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (chicago: Universidad
of Chicago Press, 2009).

4.
critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and an early champion of Meireles.

Wilson Coutinho, dir., Cildo Meireles (Brasil, 1979). Coutinho (1947–2003) was a prominent art

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OCTUBRE

Coutinho’s film and in Meireles’s oeuvre. The Western capitalist expansion
embodied by Wayne’s North American character on horseback operated much
like its European colonial precedents in the Caribbean, Central America, y
South America. These genocidal campaigns of occupation were made possible by
settler-colonial expropriative practices of ranching and “domesecration,” a term
coined by animal-studies sociologist David Nibert to defamiliarize the long history
of domesticating nonhuman animals, which not so long ago was still deemed
essential for human civilization and progress.5

In what follows, I focus on three particular passages from Coutinho’s brief
película: a painterly representation of a cow, footage from inside a poultry-process-
ing plant, and an early-nineteenth-century print showing a lavish dinner in Rio.
These three reference points allow me both to analyze the role of nonhuman
animals in Coutinho’s film and Meireles’s work from the 1970s and ’80s and to
interrogate the undemocratic outcomes—some planned, some accidental—of
animal industries in Brazil, from their emergence in European colonization to
current national, international, and corporate forms of neocolonialism. I mean
“undemocratic” beyond the traditional, anthropocentric stakes of democratic
política. En cambio, I argue for a multispecies conception of democracy by which
the well-being of the human demos is inextricably linked to the well-being of non-
human animals and communities of all kinds. Such a multispecies politics is in
accord with the many breakthroughs in cognitive ethology and behavioral ecolo-
gy that compel us to reckon with rote tropes of “animality,” as well as with the
current interest in considering the lives of nonhuman animals in political philos-
ophy and legal efforts to designate certain nonhuman species as persons, quasi-
persons, or sentient beings.6 In short, the interests of human and nonhuman
populations hinge on each other and implicate manifold social, political, eco-
nomic, and environmental emergencies, such as land expropriation, the tram-
pling of indigenous cultures, the harming of public health through the spread

5.
David Alan Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalismo, and Global
Conflicto (Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2013). I borrow “domesecration” from Nibert in order
to foreground the deleterious consequences of animal domestication. This is not to affirm that all
domesticated animals are necessarily domesecrated. Nonviolent, compassionate, and productive rela-
tionships between humans and nonhumans based on lifelong mutual dependency exist, as in the ani-
mal-sanctuary movement, and many more in the future can be envisioned.

For an example of what an interspecies democracy attentive to ethological knowledge might
6.
look like, see Eva Meijer, When Animals Speak: Towards an Interspecies Democracy (Nueva York: Nueva York
University Press, 2019). For a political philosophy that makes room for nonhuman animals, see Will
Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University
Prensa, 2011). For a critical analysis of the recent debates on the legal status of nonhuman animals, ver
Maneesha Deckha, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (toronto: Universidad de
Toronto Press, 2021). For an overview of the legal status of certain nonhuman animals specific to
Brasil, see Daniel Braga Lourenço and Carlos Frederico Ramos de Jesus, “The Legal Protection of
Animals in Brazil: Una descripción general,” in Animals in Brazil: Económico, Legal and Ethical Perspectives, ed. Carlos
Naconecy (cham, Suiza: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), páginas. 35–78.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

of zoonotic illnesses and the development of unjust foodways, and the perpetua-
tion of social and racial inequalities, as well as governmental and corporate cor-
ruption, ecocide, and global warming. As my analysis of Coutinho’s and
Meireles’s work demonstrates, industrial animal agriculture plays a deleterious
role in each of these emergencies and injustices.

Cow

Coutinho’s film opens with Erik Satie’s serene piano piece Gymnopédie No. 1
(1888) and a mise en abyme of human and nonhuman vision. A human eye, in close-
up and color, stares out unblinkingly at the viewer for about ten seconds. El
screen then immediately shifts to a painterly representation of a cow, its rearing
head in semi-profile as it too stares directly at the viewer, its left eye wide open in
distress, saliva hanging from its mouth. Coutinho’s opening sequence calls to
mind Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s avant-garde classic Un chien andalou (1929)
and its notorious substitution
of a sliced bovine eye for a
human one. En este caso, cómo-
alguna vez, the animal is not a sur-
rogate object in filmic dissim-
ulación. But neither does it,
strictly speaking, appear as
sí mismo, since this cow, cual
may or may not have existed
as a living, breathing model,
is made out of paint.
Coutinho’s camera pans slow-
ly up the canvas, dwelling on
the cow’s immediate sur-
roundings. A woman in a
white dress is struck with fear
at something unseen, as a
niño, also in distress, sostiene
on to her body. To the left, a
young boy thrusts a long
spear into the cow’s throat
from behind. Framing these
figures from above, a man
crouches in sniper’s position
on an arched cliffside, teniendo
just fired his long rifle; white
smoke fills the air around his

Wilson Coutinho. Cildo Meireles. 1979.

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Pedro Américo. Battle of Avaí. 1877.

cabeza. Over this painterly scene, the film’s narrator, actress Hileana Menezes,
laments “the violence of time and history.”7

A student of academic Brazilian painting might recognize this scene as a
detail from Pedro Américo’s monumental history painting Battle of Avaí (Batalha
do Avaí, 1877), which depicts the deadly war fought between Paraguay and the
Triple Alliance (Argentina, the Empire of Brazil, and Uruguay) de 1864 a
1870. Coutinho never shows the full painting, revealing only one other detail: un
indigenous warrior on the ground in danger of being trampled as he attempts to
hold back the leg of a cavalry horse that looms over him. Ostensibly minor pas-
sages in Américo’s painting, these two details single out the most consequential
nonhuman animals used as biological agents in the history of colonial and post-
colonial Latin America: horses and cattle.8 Pre-Colombian indigenous communi-
ties had never witnessed what must have been an imposing equestrian menace in
the guise of mounted Spanish and Portuguese invaders. The appearance of gentle
bovines may have been less threatening, but the deadly consequences of what
some historians have described as an “invasion of cattle” were even more devastat-

7.
by Filmes Verdes, Marzo 31, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG2USddDUR0.

“Cildo Meireles (1979), de Wilson Coutinho | FULL MOVIE,” YouTube video, 10:36, posted

8.
See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Provocation: Nine Provocations for the Study of
Domestication,” in Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, ed. Brezo
Anne Swanson, Marianne E. Lien, and Gro Ween (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke University Press, 2018), páginas. 242–
43. The deployment of dogs in colonial campaigns should also be stressed. See Bénédicte Boisseron,
Afro-Dog Blackness and the Animal Question (Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

ing to unsuspecting indigenous immune systems and the environment—and, if we
include the current neocolonial impact of cattle, far more long-lasting.

What is striking about Coutinho’s attention to these details in Américo’s
painting is that they augur some of Meireles’s work to come, most notably
Mission/Missions: How to Build Cathedrals (Missão/Missões: Como construir catedrais,
1987/2019) and Oblivion (Olvido, 1987/1989). The well-known Mission/Missions is
a three-tiered installation: Behind a dark veil sits a pool of six hundred thousand
coins cordoned off on the floor by a border of paving stones, two hundred cattle
bones that are backlit and dangling from steel wires on the ceiling, and a ladder of
eight hundred communion wafers connecting the two. Reviewing the literature on
this work reveals an inattention to the metonymic specificity of the cow bones in
favor of a metaphorical reading. Por ejemplo, the curator Paulo Herkenhoff
describes them as a “canopy of bones” evoking “baroque theatricality” and the
Eucharistic sacrament, thereby interpreting the nonhuman remains as metaphors
for “the conquering and devouring of humankind, as well as the physical connec-
tion between the body and God which occurs in the holy space of the church.”9 In
this interpretation, which rightly evokes the theological thrust of colonialism, el
animal is subsumed in allegory and its concrete role in Jesuit conquest is missed.
In his study of Mission/Missions, the literature and media scholar Eduardo Jorge de
Oliveira is more attentive to the material preconditions of the installation. De
Oliveira reads Mission/Missions as alluding to a changing European economy built
on previously unmapped and purportedly empty spaces in the “New World,"
which was driven by a triadic colonial force of the numismatic (coins), the reli-
gious (wafers), and the sacrificial (bones). Arising from this conquering economy
are what he describes as two “absent elements”: the building of cathedrals on one
continent, which was made possible by a new economy based on expropriated
land, and agriculture on the other.10

Yet there is only one passage in de Oliveira’s admirable analysis of
Meireles’s installation that focuses on the material specificity of the bones.11 He
notes that they are not just any part of the bovine skeleton but the tibia in partic-
ular, which is “the most animal part of the ox” insofar as it evokes the “traction
and friction [of hooves] against the ground,” the embodiment of agricultural
toil.12 This anthropocentric conception of animality as essentially grounded in
laboring for humans is suspect, even if the historical lifeworlds and genetic
makeup of certain nonhuman animals make it seem as if they are ineluctably

9.
(Londres: Phaidon, 1999), pag. 66.

Paulo Herkenhoff, “A Labyrinthine Ghetto: The Work of Cildo Meireles,” in Cildo Meireles

10.
of Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28, No. 4 (2019), pag. 6.

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, “How to Build Cathedrals: Cildo Meireles: A Sensory Geography

11.
explicit connection to domesticated animals. See ibid., pag. 24.

De Oliveira alludes to the role of zoonotic disease, though in a general way and without an

12.

Ibídem., pag. 17.

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Cildo Meireles. Mission/Missions: How to Build Cathedrals. 1987/2019.
Courtesy of the artist.

Zoonotic Undemocracy

“beasts of burden.”13 Nonetheless, de Oliveira’s attention to the tibia opens a
path for analyzing the importance of the cattle bones in Meireles’s installations.
One approach is to think through two distinct yet converging osseous temporali-
corbatas: the longue durée of breeding and domesecration, Por un lado, y el
contemporary lived time of the animal, en el otro. The first implicates a long
history of human techniques manipulating life and forming bodies—as well as
the other way around, since humans and their domesticated agents have often
entered into asymmetrical bargains of mutual influence. One of the most fateful
episodes in this deep history of domesecration is the European invasions of the
so-called New World, not only through the spread of zoonotic illness and death
but also in the way domestic animal husbandry was imposed by settler colonial-
ism and deemed essential to its “civilizing mission.” The second temporality
implicates current forms of Brazilian agribusiness and the millions of bovine
bodies and their managers who occupy and alter the environment, at a high
costo. I work through these temporalities by analyzing Meireles’s use of cattle
bones in his installations.

Columbus brought the first cattle to the West Indies in 1493, along with horses,
sheep, goats, and pigs, after which the Caribbean became a launching point for
colonial campaigns on the South American continent. Hernán Cortés was himself
an elite rancher, and after his occupation of Tenochtitlan he established cattle
ranches across Mesoamerica. Hernando de Soto employed horses, perros, and pigs
in his expeditions throughout the present-day southern United States. Behind
nearly every colonial act of violent expropriation of land, one finds an army of
European humans exploiting nonhuman animals in order to dominate non-
European humans through both economic and cultural imperialism. Novel ecolo-
gies carved out by clearing and pasturing made the “New World” more hospitable
to European primitive accumulation and settlement.14 Moreover, the economies
that drove colonialist expansion were dependent on the interdependence of
human and nonhuman labor. Meat provided a calorically dense diet for enslaved
humanos, while animal by-products, such as hides for leather and tallow rendered
from animal fat, were used to fund settler-colonial projects and capitalist expan-
sión. Without the natural lighting made possible by tallow candles, the mining and
extraction of most mineral resources, notably gold and silver, would have been dif-
ficult, if not impossible. Sugar, perhaps the key colonial export, was also depen-
dent on multispecies enforced labor, as the millstones used to crush sugarcane
were powered by cattle. The sugar plantations themselves were often initially
financed by the selling of cattle.15 Alongside these practices of land expropriation

13.
I agree with the anthropologist Anna Tsing, who urges us to denaturalize the word “domes-
tic” in the same way that “wild” and “nature” have been in certain contexts. Tsing, “Provocation: Nine
Provocations for the Study of Domestication," pag. 247.

14.
For a compelling environmental history of cattle in Latin America, see Rosa E. Ficek, “Cattle,
Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene In and Out of Human Projects,"
Current Anthropology 60, No. S20 (2019), páginas. S260–71.

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OCTUBRE

and the exploitation of human and nonhuman bodies, the presence of microscop-
ic zoonotic viruses unwittingly brought over by European explorers and missionar-
ies devastated indigenous peoples and facilitated genocidal conquest. In sum,
colonial enterprise was built on white, “humanist,” Christian supremacy and
fueled by a nonhuman animal, viral, and extractivist economy.16

The cow tibias in Mission/Missions must, por lo tanto, be interpreted as ghostly
indices of a violent, extractive past. Looming over the sacramental and numismatic
forces of settler-colonialist history, the glowing ceiling of nonhuman animal bones
are not mere symbolic surrogates for devastation and death but concrete instances
de ello. These material remains may even be encoded with genetic markers of therio-
biopower that point to the manipulation and domination of certain nonhuman
lives as a means of manipulating and dominating certain human lives. In other
palabras, the bodily remains of these cows were themselves formed and informed by
this colonial history.

Oblivion, Meireles’s companion work to Mission/Missions, reinforces many
of these observations. The installation also features cattle bones, though in this
case as a necro-aesthetic mass on the ground fenced in by a circular wall made of
69,300 candles. As with Mission/Missions, the numismatic history of capitalism
and exchange value is represented; aquí, it is in the form of a teepee covered in
the paper currencies of North, Central, and South American countries (six thou-
sand banknotes in all). This North American indigenous structure, which con-
tains a mound of charcoal and emits the sound of a chainsaw, sits directly on top
of a pile of cattle remains.17 The noise of industrial logging and the charcoal
render the teepee inhospitable, while the thick mass of bones suggests that innu-
merable lives have been lost and that nothing can grow on these grounds. Every
component of the installation evokes indigenous displacement and eradication,
gathering together the temporal layers of colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial
history that had (and continue to have) a hand in this displacement and eradica-
ción. Oblivion identifies the nonhuman animal, viral, and elemental economy
laid out above as the driving force of settler colonialism: mining, logging, defor-
estation, cattle, meat, hides, tallow/candles, and money—all playing a key role
in the genocidal and expropriative practices alluded to by the work’s title. En
both installations, sin embargo, Meireles presents a chain of signification that can
never be reduced to the symbolic, referential, or indexical alone but insists on
all three in mutual reinforcement.

In other words, the cow bones in Mission/Missions and Oblivion are both
metaphoric and metonymic of domesecration and its role in colonialist traumas
across centuries of breeding, instrumentalization, and conquest. The cattle bones

15.

Ibídem., pag. S261.

16.
See Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalismo, and Global
Conflicto, páginas. 43–69. See also Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals
Transformed Early America (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2010).

17.

De Oliveira, “How to Build Cathedrals," pag. 21.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

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Meireles. Oblivion. 1987/89.
Courtesy of the artist.

OCTUBRE

are figurative of a history of human violence, in that they stand in for indigenous
death and genocide; they are simultaneously literal in that they make up the
extracted remains of nonhuman bodies that facilitated this colonial violence. en un
sense, this second, literal reading is also partly figurative, since these cannot possi-
bly be the actual bones of cattle used centuries ago by European invaders. El
particular animal remains in Meireles’s installations may be genetically linked to
the livestock brought over by Columbus, but they are not themselves the remains
of those animals. They can only stand in for them. This means that the purely liter-
al reading of these cattle bones documents a more immediate lived time, specifi-
cally, that of cows in postcolonial and neocolonial agricultural exploitation. Estos
bones are indices of nonhuman bodies that lived and perished only recently (rela-
tive to the making of Mission/Missions and Oblivion) within a matrix of postcolonial
and neocolonial enterprise. The two installations therefore link two temporali-
ties—one colonial, the other postcolonial/neocolonial—and in each instance
function both metaphorically (of human violence) and metonymically (of extract-
ed nonhuman bodies).

Reading Mission/Missions and Oblivion with such attention to the cattle bones
reveals the history of domesecration to be a continuous shadow that looms over
Brazilian history—and today, with the global environmental implications of cattle
and deforestation, over the Earth’s history as well. The big three Brazilian meat
companies—JBS, Marfrig, and Minerva—were all made possible by decades of
business dealings and mergers facilitated by a history of US military and economic
intervention in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as by loans from the
World Bank and other neoliberal trade mechanisms.18 The size of these compa-
nies has led to accelerating environmental devastation and widespread “cattle
laundering,” in which cows illegally raised in protected areas of the Amazon enter
the legal supply chain by untraceable means via indirect farming operations.
These meat conglomerates are rhizomes of vertically integrated farms, slaughter-
houses, and processing plants spread throughout Brazil, which facilitate the furtive
traffic of bodies and prove difficult to monitor.19 Worse, cattle ranchers, often with
the help of hired gangs and paramilitary mercenaries, have violently enforced
their business interests. Chico Mendes, Sister Dorothy, José Cláudio Ribeiro da
silva, Maria do Espíroto Santo, and Maxciel Pereira dos Santos are just a few of the
environmental activists in Brazil murdered by ranchers or their proxies.20 Here is

18.

Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence, páginas. 196–202.

19.
See Dom Phillips, “Meat Company Faces Heat over ‘Cattle Laundering’ in Amazon Supply
Chain,” Guardian, Febrero 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/20/
meat-company-faces-heat-over-cattle-laundering-in-amazon-supply-chain.

The deadly assault on environmental activism in Latin America is ongoing and has only
20.
increased in the past decade. Por ejemplo, the year 2015 was one of the most murderous for environmen-
tal activists, with Brazil seeing more killings than any other country (fifty out of 185 total). The majority
have been killed by mining interests, but agribusiness and logging are not far behind. See the report “On
Dangerous Ground” published by Global Witness (https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/envi-
ronmental-activists/dangerous-ground/). For a more expansive consideration of this problem, see the
Human Rights Watch 2019 report “Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in
the Amazon” (https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/ brazil0919_web.pdf).

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

the central tragedy of Meireles’s installations in the present: The political and eco-
nomic nexus of cattle and finance has privileged the bovine body over certain
human bodies—namely, the poor and indigenous who are forced to work in
slaughterhouses and plantations or are alienated from their territories through
legal and illegal neocolonial practices of land expropriation. This industry also
continues to prioritize the growth of certain domesticated bodies over the well-
being of human communities and the more-than-human worlds dependent on the
Amazon rainforest. This is because the pasturing and slaughtering of cattle entails
the hoarding of life-supporting systems and resources—e.g., the immense amount
of land, plant calories, and water necessary for maintaining bovine bodies—that
could otherwise serve more urgent needs, including the need for “re-wilding”
ecosystems that have fallen prey to industrial clearing. The above is a clear exam-
ple of the wielding of therio-biopower: the “making live” and regimentation of a
multitude of select nonhuman animals (however temporarily in relation to normal
life expectancy) and the ecocidal “letting die” (sometimes outright killing) of cer-
tain human and nonhuman communities that find themselves in the way.
Bolsonaro’s government of bullets, beef, and Bibles reaches far into these violent
paths carved out of the Amazon.

That Meireles’s Mission/Missions and Oblivion were made in 1987 is also sig-
nificant; a year later, scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming was
brought to public attention for the first time through the NASA climatologist James
Hansen’s testimony to the United States Congress. In this context, the tibia bones
in Mission/Missions can be read as indices of greenhouse gases, específicamente
methane, which emanated from these once living bodies, and carbon dioxide
(from animal agriculture and other heavy emitting industries), which went unse-
questered as a result of the pasturing and deforestation necessary to make room
for monocrop feeds. In Oblivion, the cow remains can be read as biostratigraphic
species markers and fossils in the making, desde, alongside the even more copious
chicken remains from the poultry industry, it will be cattle bones that provide the
future biotic signals in the geological strata of the Anthropocene.21 In both instal-
laciones, the bones function as the return of the agriculturally repressed and point
to agribusiness’s responsibility not only for deforestation and global warming but
also for species extinction, biodiversity loss, and unprecedented contact between
humans and nonhumans—“spillover” that has led to epidemic and pandemic
zoonotic outbreaks.22 Adding to this catastrophic mix are the recent corruption
scandals in Brazil, which laid bare the political power that corporate meat holds in
the country. Taken together, the overlapping consequences of domesecration

21.
Staggeringly, livestock, mostly cows and pigs, currently make up sixty percent of the mam-
malian biomass on Earth, nearly double the biomass of humans. Non-domesticated mammals account
for only four percent. For the future role of chicken bones in the geological record, see Carys E.
Bennett et al., “The Broiler Chicken as a Signal of a Human Reconfigured Biosphere,” Royal Society
Open Science 5, No. 12 (2018), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180325.

22.
change-agriculture (accedido 7/23/2020).

See https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23032020/coronavirus-zoonotic-diseases-climate-

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OCTUBRE

indexed by these cattle bones in Meireles’s installations demonstrate that the
stakes of democracy are tied to and hampered by neocolonial interests—and that
the nonhuman animal, viral, and extractivist economy needs to be considered
when confronting undemocratic politics.

If Américo’s Battle of Avaí recalls a moment in Brazil’s imperial history, entonces
the work immediately following it in Coutinho’s film, by Meireles, harkens even
further back, to the figure of Tiradentes, OMS, on April 21, 1792, was publicly exe-
cuted for his anti-colonial revolutionary activities. On the anniversary of the execu-
tion in 1970, Meireles installed his Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political
Prisoner (Tiradentes: Totem-monumento ao preso politico, 1970) as part of Frederico
Morais’s confrontational Do corpo à terra exhibition in the Municipal Park of Belo

Chicken

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Meireles, Tiradentes: Totem-Monument
to the Political Prisoner. 1970.
Courtesy of the artist.

Zoonotic Undemocracy

Coutinho. Cildo Meireles. 1970.

Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The outdoor installation comprised a wooden stake
inserted into the ground with a white cloth framing its base, a clinical thermome-
ter affixed to the top of the stake, gasoline, and ten live chickens. The birds were
tethered to the wooden stake and unable to flee when Meireles set them on fire in
a political-aesthetic act of corporeal punishment. This performative installation is
often interpreted in a twofold way: The chickens are understood to be stand-ins
for political martyrs—from Tiradentes to the dissenters being tortured and killed
by the military dictatorship—and as an allusion to syncretic religious animal sacri-
fice in Brazil, a practice that, as Claudia Calirman notes, had been allegorized as
embodying state violence.23

In shifting attention from Américo’s Battle of Avaí to Meireles’s Tiradentes,
Coutinho does not move straight to the installation itself, as might be expected.
En cambio, the viewer enters a poultry-processing plant and its disassembly line.
Stunned but still living birds hang upside down with feet fastened to wires on a
slowly revolving metal carousel. Slaughterhouse workers in sterile gear walk
around a seemingly endless supply of suspended white chickens that keep coming

23.
Meireles has analogized the chickens not only to political prisoners in Brazil but also to
Buddhist monks burning themselves in protest of the Vietnam War. Herkenhoff, “A Labyrinthine
Ghetto: The Work of Cildo Meireles,” pp. 62–65. Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio
Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles, pag. 123. Though superficial combustive affinities exist, this analo-
gy is unworkable. Being burned alive against one’s will and self-immolation in a willful act of defiance
are materially and symbolically distinct. With respect to animal sacrifice, Calirman notes that “refer-
ences to Afro-Brazilian syncretic rituals of…animal sacrifices were often used in Brazil for the brutality
of the regime,” citing Barrio’s Trouxas Ensanguentadas (Bloody bundles) (1970) and Antonio Manuel’s
O bode (The Goat) (1973) alongside Meireles’s Tiradentes. Ibídem., pag. 121. This analogy between religious
animal sacrifice and state violence is also fraught, since it leads one to believe that violence toward non-
human animal life in religious ceremonies can be related to state violence against human life. Claramente,
the social, political, and ethical stakes are different.

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OCTUBRE

down the carousel. Over this scene, the female narrator gives an account of
Meireles’s Tiradentes accompanied by Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 and nondiegetic
sounds of sawing wood that sync with the images of throat-cutting. Close-up shots
of the birds being killed one by one—a repetitive gesture of grabbing the head
with one hand and slitting the throat with the other—are timed to match the
sounds of the sawing wood. Only after this industrialized bloodletting does the
film reveal images of Meireles’s installation and its post-performance remains,
though Coutinho continues to interpose imagery from the slaughterhouse: más
throat-slitting, followed by another slowly revolving carousel of now dead chickens,
defeathered and hung by the neck.

Over these images of rotating chicken bodies and Meireles’s installation, el
narrator says the words “the possibility of making visible the obscurity of
violence.”24 This suggests that both sequences, the poultry production plant and
Meireles’s Tiradentes, are analogical of dictatorial state violence—the former as vic-
arious gallows on film, the latter as corporeal torture in live performance. Ambos
use the nonhuman body as an allusive cipher for human trauma. If we dig deeper,
sin embargo, complications arise that alter the installation’s meaning. In most discus-
sions of Tiradentes, the birds are treated as readymade sacrificial surrogates with no
context—a context that Coutinho provides viscerally in his film. It should be
stressed that Coutinho provides this context in a threefold way: as avant-garde film-
haciendo, since these images of a chicken-disassembly line accompanied by the
incongruous sounds of sawing wood likely elicit a visceral response in the viewer;
as a historical document, since these scenes make visible the development of indus-
trial animal production in Brazil; y, in his coupling of these images with the
photographs and a discussion of Meireles’s work, as art criticism. In this way,
Coutinho allows for a multifaceted interpretation of Tiradentes, one that simultane-
ously revitalizes an affective rawness largely missing from photographic documen-
tation, provides commentary, and offers a glimpse into the historical, cultural, y
economic context of the nonhuman bodies used in Meireles’s provocation against
the military dictatorship.

Keeping this context in mind is important, since it fundamentally alters and
enriches our understanding of the birds featured in Tiradentes beyond their being
simply available as raw material for art. When we consider the history of animal
production and domesecration, there is a crucial difference between a family of
subsistence farmers sacrificing one of their chickens—be it for sustenance, in a
ceremony, as a gift, or in some other symbolic act—and a large-scale industrial
operation discarding one bird’s body among thousands, millions, even billions of
otros. The first is a local site of non-substitution, in which an animal matters,
however minimally and in the instrumentalized service of human culture and tra-
condición; a subsistence farmer, in everyday conviviality with nonhuman animals,
often comes to understand them proto-ethologically as having distinguishable per-

24.

Coutinho, Cildo Meireles, 2:31–36.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

sonality traits, a phenomenon that animal-behavior scientists have only recently
come to verify in the case of chickens. The second is a global site of absolute sub-
stitution in which one chicken body is interchangeable with and reducible to any
otro. To borrow terms from Meireles (albeit in a different context, el 1984 texto
“Obscura Luz [Obscure Light]"), the difference is between what is perishable and
what is discardable: “The perishable is a metaphysical condition which can be over-
come by accepting the hypothesis that the universe is finite. ‘Discardability’ is a
consumer-economic practice based on the illusion of infinity.”25 In other words,
the perishable has auratic value while the discardable falls under the law of gener-
al equivalence. The cow bones in Mission/Missions and Oblivion also attest to the
power of general equivalence, since the interchangeable/discardable tibias cover
the tracks of the singular/perishable beings from which they were culled.

Coutinho’s film shows that already by the late ’70s the chicken had entered into
a production system rendering the avian body into standardized and commodified
parts on an unprecedented scale.26 Although it is difficult to establish the resulting
changes in public perception short of sociological and material culture research, es
almost certain that perceptions of domesticated animals were altered as a result of
this history of industrial animal production. This includes the loss of visibility, desde
one of the outcomes of industrial animal agriculture is to hide the multitude of non-
human bodies being extracted, furthering Coutinho’s analogy of the “obscurity of
violence” and the disassembly line, Meireles’s Tiradentes, and the military dictator-
ship’s torture and disappearance of people. Perhaps the most consequential change
in the perception of domesticated animals for my present purposes has to do with the
paradoxical loss of scarcity in inverse proportion to their becoming less visible as
whole living beings. As was the case with many nations in the twentieth century,
Brazil’s animal-industrial complex shifted meat consumption from an occasional lux-
ury (outside the elite classes) to commercial abundance along the reach of its distrib-
ution chains. These economic developments almost certainly hold implications for
the social and cultural perception of domesticated animals like chickens, for the
increasing supply of individual “units” and the corresponding shrinkage of profit
margins accelerated the scale of production. This economic devaluation has unavoid-
ably led to changes in the social and cultural value, if not also the moral value, de
these domesticated animals. Hoy, if chickens are thought of at all, it is most often as
mundane, low-cost meat.27

25.
pag. 128.

Cildo Meireles, “Obscura Luz (Obscure Light),” in Cildo Meireles (Londres: Phaidon, 1999),

26.
The animal-industrial complex expanded significantly in Brazil during the second half of the
twentieth century, when the country went from a net food importer to one of the largest meat
exporters in the world. Brazil produced one billion food animals in 1960; en 1970, three billion; por
2015 the total had neared six billion. Chickens represent the largest percent in sheer numbers. Ver
Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Marly Winckler, “Food Animals in Brazil: Five Decades of Transformation,"
in Naconecy, Animals in Brazil, páginas. 10–11.

27.
This dynamic of scarcity and value in relation to nonhuman animals can be clarified by a helpful
hypothetical: If only a few chicken species remained on Earth, and not the estimated seventy-two billion
currently being bred annually, they would likely be listed as endangered and encoded with value beyond
the economic.

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However obliquely, these socioeconomic developments left their mark on
the art history of this period, for if living chickens became increasingly invisible
along industrial systems of production, they became increasingly visible in works of
arte. Along with Meireles’s Tiradentes, perhaps the most spectacular example was
the Brazilian artist Marta Minujín’s Plastic Event (Suceso plástico, 1965), a happening
in which five hundred live chickens were thrown out of a helicopter and onto its
audience in Montevideo, Uruguay.28 In fact, chickens appear in the work of an
international roster of artists in the 1960s and ’70s: Allan Kaprow’s Chicken (1962),
Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s Untitled (Mummy
with Chicken) (1965), Hans Haacke’s Chickens Hatching (1969), Ana Mendieta’s
Untitled (Chicken Piece, Shot #2) (1972), Luis Ferenando Benedit’s Eggs Project
(Proyecto huevos, 1976–77), and Jeffrey Vallance’s Blinky: The Friendly Hen (1979).
While these works are heterogenous and serve varied ideological purposes, qué
they hold in common is a newfound visibility of chicken bodies in art. This devel-
opment should not simply be chalked up to the aesthetic deregulation and disin-
hibition, well underway at the time, of what can be used as a medium for art, pero
should also be seen as reflective of the socioeconomic backdrop of increasing
availability, directly or indirectly, of animal bodies through industrial production.

It is against this socioeconomic backdrop that Meireles’s Tiradentes enters
into interpretive complications. Chickens can only truly stand in for political
martyrdom if their deaths actually matter. In other words, a sacrifice of any
kind—be it aesthetico-political or religious—is only nominal if the offering does
not entail the loss of an irreplaceable entity (the same holds for the uncondi-
tional gift). It follows that, if the chickens are sacrificial and do matter, then they
are potentially meaningful surrogates for political martyrdom in their perishabil-
ity—which further means that Meireles’s Tiradentes and the poultry plant from
Coutinho’s film entail the destruction of singular avian bodies and minds. If the
chickens do not matter, sin embargo, then they cannot be sacrificed, only discarded
like any other replaceable object—which further means that Meireles’s work is
only superficially or nominally sacrificial and that the animal-disassembly line in
Coutinho’s film holds little ethical or emotive interest, severing any real analogy
with state violence.

Claramente, there is something affectively potent about a nonhuman animal’s
having its throat slit or suffering and perishing in flames, which is why Tiradentes is
such a visceral politico-aesthetic analogy for state violence. Burning stuffed animal
effigies would not have had the same effect. I further argue that, in the case of
such nonhuman animal surrogates, analogy is fueled by homology. To burn and

28.
The German-born Uruguayan artist, curator, and critic Luis Camnitzer relates that
Uruguayans were shocked at Minujín’s treatment of these chickens, which occurred near a poor
neighborhood that could have used them as resources. This demonstrates that the increasing com-
mercial abundance of chicken bodies did not reach all times, lugares, and demographics at once. Ver
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Nueva York: Verso Books,
2012), pag. 315n3.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

perish like humans who experience violence, these birds also have to be, en parte,
homologous to human minds and bodies in the evolutionary sense of kinship,
which dictates that bird mindedness and embodiment are filiated with our own
minds and bodies to certain degrees.29 Being unable to escape one’s body in pain
and losing consciousness are embodied conditions shared by human and innu-
merable nonhuman animals. Such homological affinities include many personality
traits pointing toward nonhuman individuation, memory, and self-awareness—
what Jacques Derrida described as the “ipseity of being able to be or able to do ‘I,'
even before any autoreferential utterance in a language”30—forms of singulariza-
tion that preclude the tautology of standardized production. In other words,
chickens only have the appearance of being an undifferentiated, homogenous
mass in an industrial setting. In reality, they are a multitude of singularities with
meaningful variations for us and among themselves. This reading of Tiradentes may
be uncomfortable, since so-called food animals are rarely a point of concern in
humanistic disciplines like art history, yet it is an interpretation that befits the cur-
rent ethological evidence on avian life.31 This interpretation has further merit in
the broader political context, desde, as we have seen with respect to cattle, state vio-
lence and anti-democratic powers in politics and society are, en parte, driven by
agribusiness. Tiradentes, por lo tanto, can be read as both metaphoric and metonymic
of state violence and the sociopolitical disparities engendered and maintained by
intensive animal production, of which the poultry plant in Coutinho’s film is but
one example. Just as Mission/Missions and Oblivion serve as metaphoric and
metonymic examples of domesecration, Tiradentes offers both metaphoric and
metonymic readings of state violence and repression.

These observations do not leave Meireles’s work unscathed. The power of
Tiradentes resides, in large part, in its morally transgressive or ethically question-
able act of sacrificing singular beings, which necessarily involved inflicting irre-
versible damage and death. The work’s logic is one of fighting fire with fire.
Consequentially, there is a kernel of cynicism or bad faith in Tiradentes, insofar as
its provocation against military violence mimics another form of violence. In hind-
sight, Meireles acknowledges that his installation was a violent gesture—albeit to

29.
What I am arguing for is a multispecies attention to overlapping differences and sameness,
which vary from species to species. Además, I hope to undercut any form of human supremacy
founded on the ontological differences between human and nonhuman animals.

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Nueva York: Fordham
30.
Prensa universitaria, 2008), pag. 92. Nonhuman individuation and personality traits have become viable top-
ics of study in the animal-behavior sciences. See Claudio Carere and Dario Maestripieri, Animal
Personalities: Comportamiento, Physiology, y evolución (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

31.
Western science is only beginning to discover the richness of the cognitive, emotional, y
social lives of chickens. For my purposes, calling attention to avian forms of individuation, such as sin-
gular memory, facial recognition of humans and fellow species members, and evidence of distinct per-
sonality traits, points to a non-standardized conception of these birds, which complicates their treat-
ment as undifferentiated entities. For a cogent review of the ethological literature, see Lori Marino,
“Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emoción, and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken,” Animal
Cognición 20, No. 2 (2017), páginas. 127–47.

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OCTUBRE

his mind necessary at the time—but one he would never repeat: “I can still hear
those poor hens in my emotional memory.”32 A similarly fraught analogical
dynamic could be found in Artur Barrio’s use of raw cow flesh in his Situação. . . . .
. . .T/T1. . . . . . . , (Situation. . . . . . . .T/T1. . . . . . ., 1970), which came to be
known as Trouxas ensanguentadas or “bloody bundles.” Also included in Morais’s Do
corpo à terra exhibition, these fourteen clothbound bundles of bovine flesh were
anonymously placed by the artist in riverbeds and sewers around the city. Su
similarity to human flesh was strong enough to make the public and authorities
believe they might be crime scenes (the cattle bones were even sent to a laboratory
for analysis), though in truth, they were acquired at nearby slaughterhouses.33
Like Meireles’s Tiradentes, the metaphoric resonance of Barrio’s offal-soaked bun-
dles is founded on a violent metonymic complicity with animal industrial produc-
ción. Pointing out this complicity is less a moralizing judgment against the artists
themselves than the making explicit of a structural complication of socioeconomic
violence, which affords a wider view of human and nonhuman bodies in their
artistic, ético, and political entanglements in Brazil and beyond.

Neocolonial Diets

It is significant that the exhibition Do corpo à terra was held in the state of
Minas Gerais, as a key economic sector is agricultural, notably cattle ranching, y
the region has historically been the main supplier of beef and dairy products to
Río de Janeiro. In this section of my essay, I call attention to agricultural history—
deeply entwined as it is with colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial dynamics, para
nearly every kind of domesticated animal now ubiquitous in Brazil was originally
imported there—in relation to the final detail in Coutinho’s film connected to
nonhuman animals. Looking at an early-nineteenth-century colonial print depict-
ing a lavish dinner table, I ask the following: How might the historical strata of
hybrid and syncretic dietary regimes be interpreted as symptomatic or reflective of
geopolitical realities that result in or maintain inequality, racism, y, al final,
state and corporate forms of governmentality and control? Answering this ques-
tion necessitates understanding domesecrated bodies not only as ostensibly ready-
made units of profit but also as symbols of power and social inequality. In addi-
ción, so-called food animals should be seen as casualties and living proof of
agribusiness’s environmental warfare, often waged in collaboration with the state,
ruling political and corporate classes, and international financial institutions.

A este respecto, Calirman notes a telling episode having to do with the right-
wing military reception of Meireles’s Tiradentes. On the day after the performance,
leaders of the Brazilian military government, including President Emílio

32.
Meireles,” in Cildo Meireles (Phaidon), pag. 15.

Cildo Meireles and Gerardo Mosquera, “Gerardo Mosquera in Conversation with Cildo

33.

Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, páginas. 90–91.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

Garrastazú Médici, denounced the work over lunch.34 By this point in Brazilian
historia, the figure of Tiradentes had proved ideologically malleable. As an anti-
colonialist, he could be likened to dissenters of the dictatorship, while as a nation-
alist hero, he could simultaneously be co-opted by the military police as its patron
(the military even sponsored Do corpo à terra, since it fell on April 21, the national
holiday celebrating Tiradentes). Calirman picks up on the ironic detail of these
military leaders’ condemning Meireles’s work while lunching on coq au vin,35 a
traditionally French culinary import symbolizing prestige and a “civilizing” diet
dating back to European colonization. By the ’70s, this dish had acquired a neo-
colonial layer in the sense that the bodies served to the generals, like those immo-
lated in Meireles’s installation, arrived at the table via an increasingly multination-
al neoliberal model of industrial meat production that saw Brazil, as well as most
of Central and South America, partner with US and other foreign interests.36 In
noting this episode, Calirman means to insinuate a facile irony comprising two sets
of birds—one for art, the other for elite military men, with the latter unaware of
their hypocrisy in denouncing the former. This irony falters, sin embargo, since the
military’s denunciation was almost certainly leveled more at the symbolism of
political martyrdom than out of any sympathy for the chickens themselves. El
deeper irony lies in the fact that both military meal and transgressive art installa-
tion involved bodies likely sourced from the same industrial foodways.

With reference to industrial foodways in the context of Meireles’s work, el
more obvious choice is Coca-Cola, y, en efecto, toward the end of his film,
Coutinho brings the viewer inside one of the company’s production plants. Un
immediate visual parallel is established between the assembly line of sterilized glass
bottles whizzing by, waiting to be filled, and the disassembly line of chickens from
the beginning of the film. Both bottles and birds are suspended and standardized
on their way to market channels. Alongside these images from the Coca-Cola plant
Coutinho interposes scenes of John Wayne in El Dorado, his voice track having
been overdubbed by a male narrator (Jorges Ramos) in an audio détournement that
is both comic and critical. “Wayne” tells the viewer he is “here in the West, en el
middle of this savage capitalism, to hold a conference about Cildo Meireles,”37 and
proceeds to give an admiring lecture on some of Meireles’s insertion projects that

34.

Ibídem., pag. 123.

35.
Meireles’s recollection is slightly different. He remembers reading a newspaper article at the
time that covered the exhibition and the junta’s denouncing of his work and claimed that the dish
served was Brazilian chicken in blood sauce, in which case the culinary pedigree is Portuguese. See his
interview on Follow Arterial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHZQaoHeRMI.

36.
The first president of the military dictatorship, Castello Branco, came from a ranching family
and expanded cattle pasturing into the Amazon rain forest with the financial backing of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, not to mention the assistance of the US government in the
1964 coup that deposed the previous president of Brazil, João Goulart. It is during the time of the mili-
tary dictatorship in Brazil that chicken production exploded, turning chicken from a luxury item to a
major national export.

37.

Coutinho, Cildo Meireles, 4:42.

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OCTUBRE

Coutinho. Cildo Meireles. 1970.

involved the manipulation and recirculation of consumer objects, goods, and cur-
rency: glass bottles in Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (1970),
counterfeit tokens for transportation, telephones, and dispensing machines in
Insertions into Anthropological Circuits (Inserções em cirucuitos antropológicos, 1971), y
forged Brazilian cruzeiro bills with no value in Zero Cruzeiro (1974–78). Upon con-
cluding his “conference,” the Hollywood star rides off on his horse, whereupon
the female narrator returns to close out the film. Al hacerlo, she claims that the
role of the artist is to unmask illusions and to guard against “fixed images, against
temptation from the past, of the order of the past.”38 Accompanying this state-
mento, Coutinho shows examples of such “fixed” ideological images in the form of
prints by Jean-Baptiste Debret, the founder of the first Brazilian Academy of Art
and foremost visual documenter of early-nineteenth-century Brazil during its tran-
sition from colony to empire. Coutinho chose four watercolor plates from
Debret’s three-volume Voyage pittoresque et historique en Brésil (1834 –39): Cabocle,
(Indien civilizé), showing two indigenous hunters lying on their back and shooting
at birds, possibly great egrets, with bow and arrow drawn taut by their feet;
Transport d’un enfant blanc, pour être baptisé à l’église, depicting a cortège of four
Afro-descendant servants carrying a white infant to baptism; Les délassements d’une
après diner, comprising four men relaxing after a meal; and Le dîner, revealing what
such a meal looked like. I turn to this last image, desde, alongside Cabocle (Indien
civilizé), it also relates to the role of animals in Brazilian history and society, si, in its
subtle politics of food, more surreptitiously than Américo’s Battle of Avaí or
Meireles’s Mission/Missions, Oblivion, and Tiradentes.

Le dîner portrays a white couple seated across from each other and enjoying
their domestic setting. Their dress, the food and drink on the table, y el
Black servants standing quietly behind them attest to their wealth. A female ser-
vant fans the couple as they eat, while two male servants stand at the other end

38.

Ibídem., 8:20–34.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

of the dining room with arms crossed—one just behind the master of the house,
who is lifting food to his mouth, the other leaning against a doorframe, su
attentiveness laden with ambivalence.39 The most egregiously racist passage in
this print involves two young Black children in the foreground. The older child,
who appears to be a girl, stands just below the tabletop’s edge and is naked aside
from a decorative collar around her neck and a bracelet on her left arm. El
younger child, likely a boy, sits completely naked on the bare hardwood floor.
The mistress of the house is handing what appears to be a piece of meat off the
end of a fork to the older child, who takes it with both hands. The younger child
is already eating the morsel given to him. Each print in Voyage pittoresque has a
corresponding text by Debret, in this case Le dîner, which describes the hybrid
eating habits in Rio. After accounting for the variable eating times and caution-
ing the reader not to disturb store owners during their meals, Debret turns his
attention to the wealthy couple at the table and the meal itself. The master is

39.
Trauma,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014), páginas. 39–48.

See Marcus Wood, “Slavery and the Romantic Sketch: Jean-Baptiste Debret’s Visual Poetics of

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from Voyage pittoresque et historique en Brésil. 1834–39.

Jean-Baptiste Debret. Le dîner,

OCTUBRE

described as eating in silence, tending to professional affairs. By contrast, el
mistress is animated and plays with her “petit négrillons.” This racial slur used to
describe the young Black children is reinforced by explicit codings of animaliza-
tion and primitivizing aspersions: Like little “dogs,” they are “spoiled” and
“wretched” and are said to often be found fighting over leftovers with other
“domestic animals” in the alley. Once of age, they will come under the strict
supervision of the servants in order to be “domesticated.”40

Any analysis of this print should prioritize and denounce the racialized ani-
malization of the young children by the wealthy family. It is a form of control
through pseudo-ontological debasement, calling attention to a colonialist history
of anti-Blackness and bestialization that also implicates the lives of the Afro-
descendant servants.41 This analysis, sin embargo, should also critique a more subtle
and entrenched form of animalization present at this meal—namely, the animal-
ization of sentient nonhuman beings. In truth, there have always been two distinct
forms of animalization deployed as discursive and material power over other bod-
ies in human history, especially Western colonialist history: that of human and
nonhuman beings. The animalization of human beings is a form of debasement
founded on superficial or nonexistent differences between humans, cual
includes infrahumanization, whereby certain humans are understood to be less
than fully human by virtue of their purportedly greater share of human animality.
The animalization of nonhuman beings is a form of debasement founded on
superficial or real differences between humans and other species (or between two
separate nonhuman species, one of which is deemed more or less animal by virtue
of its proximity to human culture). Además, these two forms of animalization
often work together to fuel supremacist ideologies. The first form of animalization
I point to will not sound radical, since it is commonly found in histories of primi-
tivism, racism, sexism, and classicism. By contract, the second form of animaliza-
tion may seem prima facie absurd. Después de todo, how can animals be animalized “as if”
they were animals when they are, En realidad, animals? However compelling such com-
monsense reasoning may be, this line of thinking betrays an implicit overestima-
tion of human language’s ability to fully account for the complex entities that
inhabit the world alongside us. This is especially true when it comes to an umbrel-
la term like “animal,” which is so inexact and exhausted in its overreaching
attempt to designate the manifold of other minds on Earth.42 Moreover, to imply

Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, ou Séjour d’un artiste français au
40.
Brésil, depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 inclusivement, a mi 2 (París: Firmin-Didot 1834), páginas. 39–41. All transla-
tions mine.

41.
The relationship between anti-Blackness and animalization is delicate and fraught, especially
when tending toward reductive analogies. Recent animal-studies scholars have begun interrogating the
interlocking forms of oppression based in race and species without employing naive or opportunistic
comparisons. See the work of Neel Ahuja, Bénédicte Boisseron, Maneesha Deckha, Lori Gruen,
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Claire Jean Kim, and Alexander G. Weheliye.

42.
This is why Derrida coined the term animot, a French neologism combining “animal” and
“word,” in order to effectively put the homophonous plural animaux (animals) under erasure. Ver
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, páginas. 47–48.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

that it is only natural that animals be animalized because they are, En realidad, animals is
patently circular; it is a performative presumption that is only coherent in the
closed system of a sentence. There is, furthermore, a semiotic affiliation between
“animal” and “animalization” that holds real-life consequences, for it is difficult to
imagine a conception of the animal or of animality that is not already contaminat-
ed with associations and histories of animalization—in other words, of deeming
nonhuman life to be fit for debasement, for falling naturally under regimes of
control and killability, and to otherwise be coded as lesser than certain humans. I
insist on reconceiving the superficial and real differences between humans and
nonhuman animals as difference without debasement, which will not only serve to ame-
liorate discrimination toward nonhuman beings through practices of animaliza-
ción (including in food systems) but will also severely complicate human animal-
ization by undercutting the naturalizing placeholder of “animal” or “animality,"
that purportedly intrinsic quality of certain cultured, raced, sexed, or classed
human beings that has justified their debasement either subtly or explicitly.

Remaining vigilant with respect to these two forms of animalization, de
human and nonhuman beings, also provides a method for historical analysis, como
they can often be found together in mutually reinforcing modes of bodily control
that have been used to rationalize the instrumentalization, subjection, violence,
and death of certain humans and nearly all nonhuman animals.43 For this reason,
the “animal” needs to be defamiliarized from its commonsense reduction inside
“animalization.” This is for two interlocking reasons: Primero, nonhuman animal bod-
ies and minds have always had a way of escaping the semiotic (not to mention
físico) confines imposed on them—in other words, there is a plasticity of being
and becoming inherent to animal life that overflows the strict categories and
behavioral determinisms that have been placed on the manifold of nonhuman
minds and lifeworlds.44 Second, the cultural and even scientific concept of animal-
ity is malleable and cannot be thought of as a universal concept. It has come
under serious revaluation in Western ethological knowledge and, además, era
never reducible to the onto-semantic subject of “animalization” in many non-
Western cultures, where any equivalent abjection of nonhuman beings is foreign
and the totalizing word “animal” may be nonexistent. This is further attested by
the fact that practices of domesecration have not been used at all times and by all
human societies, even if that appearance holds today in the wake of a globalized

43.
For a brilliant analysis of animalization in the context of anti-Blackness, see Zakiyyah Iman
Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Nueva York: New York University
Prensa, 2020). Jackson examines the convergences and differences between these two animalizations and
offers an important methodological path forward: “[C]ritical black studies must challenge animaliza-
tion on at least two fronts: animalizing discourse that is directed primarily at people of African descent,
and animalizing discourse that reproduces the abject abstraction of ‘the animal’ more generally
because such an abstraction is not an empirical reality but a metaphysical technology of bio/necropoli-
tics applied to life arbitrarily” (ibid., pag. 15).

44.
For a fascinating analysis of nonhuman animal plasticity and supernormality, the latter being
a term coined by the modern ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, see Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us
about Politics (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke University Press, 2014).

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appetite for domesticating technologies and economies—Brazil being a salient
case in point.

Although not pictured in Coutinho’s film, another print by Debret illustrates
how these two forms of animalization reinforce each other. Transport de viande de la
boucherie shows four oxen harnessed to a wagon containing cattle carcasses. El
four “beasts of burden” are accompanied by four Black slaughterhouse workers—
two carrying slabs of beef over their heads and two prodding the cattle with long
poles to keep things moving. The image communicates a scene of species debase-
ment that implicates both human and nonhuman. The necro-economy of bovine
body parts, which in this case subordinates nonhuman animals to carry the
remains of their own kind, is facilitated by the exploitation of poor and racialized

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Jean-Baptiste Debret. Transport de viande de la boucherie,
from Voyage pittoresque et historique en Brésil.1834–39.

Zoonotic Undemocracy

human laborers forced to take on the harrowing and dangerous slaughterhouse
work and transport depicted in this print. Along this dusty road to Rio, the colo-
nial history of cattle invasions and genocide meets the post- and neocolonial histo-
ry of the cattle economy, which maintains the subordination of the environment
and those deemed ontologically inferior and expendable.

Debret’s lack of self-awareness reaches breathtaking heights in the text that
accompanies Transport de viande de la boucherie. He begins by basking in the civiliz-
ing mission of freshly slaughtered cattle, destined for shops in Rio, in a climate he
claims is not conducive to the raising of beef. Yet Debret spends most of this text
lamenting the “deeply ingrained Brazilian barbarity” evident in the way “negroes”
go about butchering animals without considering that such practices were
imposed by settler-colonialism as part of its “civilizing mission” (nor does Debret
consider that the owners of land, domesecrated animals, and slaughterhouses are
all white- and Euro-descendant, which continues to be predominantly the case
hoy). He describes the slaughterhouse as filled with half-dead bodies falling on
top of each other while having their heads cut off. Even more “repugnant” are the
Black workers themselves, the “disgusting sacrificiers” who go straight to a bar for
an “eau de vie” or sangria “still covered in blood from their grisly work.”45 In this
way, Debret presumes—one could even say fantasizes—a Black psyche that is
essentially cruel and barbaric, even though these workers have been compelled to
work in conditions that necessitate cruelty. This is another concrete example of
reinforcing animalizations, whereby human animalization, or infrahumanization,
is purportedly confirmed by disregarding or disavowing the animalization of the
nonhuman. That cows need to be slaughtered is, for Debret, never open to
debate, making the killings a neutral gesture that need not complicate his assess-
ment of these “disgusting sacrificers.” But for the precarious humans involved in
the slaughterhouse’s inherently violent activities, killing is hardly neutral—cultur-
ally, psychically, or physiologically.46 Debret’s lack of self-awareness allows him to
pathologize the animalized humans as barbaric by disavowing the traumas
induced by the repeated infliction of pain and death on sentient nonhuman
beings (he never pauses to think that such work might necessitate a numbing drop

45.

Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, pag. 90.
The dogma that slaughtering animals is natural and neutral has become acutely strained dur-
46.
ing the COVID-19 pandemic: inconsolable farmers lamenting the culling of pigs that had no viable eco-
nomic paths of travel in the food system; precarious workers contracting COVID-19 in hotspot slaughter-
houses; former president Trump invoking the Defense Production Act to keep animal industries up
and running under the pseudo-justification that they are essential to national security. In all three
examples, that it is important to produce animal bodies for consumption is a foregone conclusion,
even in the face of evidence of trans-species emotional distress, the exploitation and death of precari-
ous workers, and histories of pandemics and epidemics whose origins are traceable back to intensive
animal agriculture and that represent very real threats to national security. That the killing of nonhu-
man animals is far from psycho-socially neutral is also attested by statistics indicating increased rates of
violence in areas close to slaughterhouses. See Amy J. Fitzgerald, Linda Kalof, and Thomas Dietz,
“Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover from ‘the Jungle’
into the Surrounding Community,” Organization and Environment 22, No. 2 (2009), páginas. 1–27.

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OCTUBRE

of alcohol). It may even be that his disavowal is maintained only by the displaced
debasement of the Black slaughterhouse worker in order not to fully confront the
act of slaughtering itself, which remains unseen in the print. This racialized
pathologizing, projected as an innate feature of an “uncivilized” psyche, is there-
fore made possible by making the rendering of the nonhuman body invisible (o
only partly visible in commodifiable pieces after the fact). Sucesivamente, the violence of
the slaughterhouse—and its circumstantially induced pathological disorders—are
displaced onto the Afro-descendant worker as essential traits in Debret’s self-fulfill-
ing prophecy of the Other.47

Absent from the print Transport de viande de la boucherie are its profiteers and
consumers, which is why placing Le dîner alongside it proves subversive. If we revisit
the wealthy couple in Rio, it is clear that the racialized human laborers making the
elaborate dishes possible have not been invited to the table. In the case of the non-
humans involved, they are only partially visible—or only visible as “absent refer-
ents,” a term coined by the ecofeminist Carol A. Adams for how visual culture dis-
simulates the embodied origins of extracted animal products, often through gas-
tronomic traditions.48 Debret catalogues the copious dishes on offer: a “caldo de
sustancia,” or bouillon soup made with an “enormous piece of beef” into which
lard, sausages, tomatoes, cabbage, and radishes have been added; various “piles” of
boiled meats and vegetables; fowl served with rice; and manioc seasoned with a
“consommé of meat, tomato juice, or shrimp coulisse.” Rounding out the meal are
a salad, oranges, a dessert, cheese from Minas Gerais, and coffee. While Debret
focuses largely on this opulent dinner, he also gives contrasting accounts of lower-
class diets—from the slightly less lavish merchant’s to the worker’s to the indige-
nous or servant’s and, finalmente, most “revoltingly,” the medicant’s.49 These racially
demarcated and class-based diets become not only humbler as one moves toward
the beggar but also less meat-filled, reinforcing the symbolic power of animal
products as “civilizing.” Even the mistress’s extending of food on silverware is
grounded in a symbolic difference: White hands remain unsullied while young fin-
gers hold the food directly—a class-race dynamic of eating with one’s hands still
present in contemporary Brazilian society.50

Le dîner is a prophetic scene in miniature for the subsequent development of
post- and neocolonial cultural and economic development in Brazil, particularly
its food politics. As with the young children and servants who are largely depen-
dent on their wealthy patrons, the struggle for food sovereignty and land rights is a
continuing one for poor, indigenous, and Afro-descendant populations. Meireles’s

47.
contrasts with the scenes he describes.

Debret also fails to account for how his presumably white and more “civilized” butchering

48.

49.

See her classic ecofeminism text The Sexual Politics of Meat, first published in 1990.

Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, páginas. 39–40.

50.
Susan Paulson, “Sensations of Food: Growing for the Nation and Eating with the Hand in
Bahia, Brasil,” in Geographies of Race and Food: Campos, Bodies, Markets, ed. Rachel B. Slocum and Arun
Saldanha (Londres: Routledge, 2016), páginas. 103–06.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

biography is connected to these struggles: His father, Cildo Furtado Meirelles
[sic], was president of the FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Ínido) and fought on
behalf of the indigenous Krahô people, whose first contact with Europeans came
in the early nineteenth century with the encroachment of cattle operations that
displaced them, and who were subsequently decimated by cattle ranchers in the
1940s.51 Meireles made use of his father’s audio recordings documenting indige-
nous music and rituals, along with interviews and narrative accounts of their mas-
sacre, en su 1975 sound sculpture Sal Sem Carne (Salt without meat), cual
Coutinho uses as an aural dimension in his film. The invisibility of food laborers to
society and their alienation from democratic processes are also widespread prob-
lemas. These inequalities have been engendered and maintained, en parte, by agri-
cultural practices and unequal power dynamics—the cattle ranchers devastating
the Krahô being a symptomatic example. The food-studies scholar Susan Paulson
notes more broadly how such inequalities have been established by the legacy of
settler-colonialism, whereby “the development of racial ideologies and mecha-
nisms has been driven by the appropriation and exploitation by White/European-
identified people of land and other natural resources formerly controlled by non-
European people.”52 In other words, postcolonial ideals have been unable to free
themselves from colonialist history, morphing into neocolonial ideals that uncriti-
cally or cynically replicate the inequalities of so-called developed states—and are
often coerced into doing so by these developed states through hard and soft
fuerza. The Brazilian meat industry attests to this conundrum: Founded on the
colonial importation of domesecration and the cattle invasions, today it represents
a point of economic pride and privilege for the country; yet by virtue of its post-
colonial success and expansion, the industry has neocolonized the society it bene-
fits in highly unequal ways, exploiting precarious populations and cannibalizing
fragile ecosystems in the process.

Zoonotic Undemocracy

On August 19, 2019, fires in the Amazon caught the attention of the world
when São Paulo was plunged into darkness by smoke clouds. The forest-clearing
role of cattle and other legal and illegal industries in Brazil became a matter of
global discussion, even leading to modest calls for eating less beef. At the start of
2020, with similarly apocalyptic fires consuming Australia, a different sort of crisis
emerged in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, which almost certainly began in
the body of a bat—be it in a lab that sourced a novel coronavirus from a wild host

The cattle ranchers flew over the reservation and dropped infected clothing; see de Oliveira,
51.
“How to Build Cathedrals,” pp. 13, 25. Meireles’s uncle, Chico Meireles, and his nephew, Apoena
Meireles, were also involved with land activism and indigenous-rights movements. See Calirman,
Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, pag. 116.

52.

Paulson, “Sensations of Food," pag. 99.

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for research purposes or, more plausibly, at an animal market.53 The Amazon fires
can be connected to the normative practice of breeding and consuming bovine
bodies on a global scale, which implicates widespread deforestation and the emis-
sion of greenhouse gases that alter the thermal composition of our planetary
biome. The current pandemic can be connected to the coming into contact with
and consumption of a nonhuman body tied to local tastes, which implicates a
novel coronavirus that compromises the respiratory and immune systems of our
bodily biomes.54 For all their differences, these events are part of the same prob-
lem: Both imperil us and both are fueled and spread by a networked and global-
ized economy; both are exacerbated by disparate undemocratic and authoritarian
política; and both are zoonotic, in the exact and loose definition of this word, en
that they originated in the drive to dominate the environment via the practice of
confining and consuming nonhuman animals.

Considering these events together undercuts any racist argumentation con-
cerning culturally niche eating practices associated with “foreign” so-called wet
markets and animal trafficking. This is because global hegemonic Western forms
of nonhuman animal confinement and killing represent legalized forms of traf-
ficking bodies that have been equally, if not more, disastrous than non-Western
local practices of animal consumption. For every epidemic or pandemic traced
back to an “exotic” nonhuman body—like SARS in 2002 or MERS in 2012—many
more can be traced back to a mundane Western “food animal”: por ejemplo, el
1918 influenza pandemic, the bird-flu epidemics of 1997 y 2004, el 2009
swine-flu pandemic, and likely the next pandemic around the corner.55 The more
honest approach is to affirm that colonialist therio-biopower and ecological war-
tarifa, which have been central themes of this essay, are far from over. Hoy, living
under the threat of domesecration’s consequences and viral pathogens has
become a universal, planetary condition. This threat is no longer limited to
European colonial-settler operations that conquer non-Europeans with the unwit-
ting help of zoonotic diseases from which the imperials are happily immune; it is a
planet-encompassing autoimmunological complex comprising billons of immiser-
ated animal bodies, greenhouse gases, and novel viruses that stifles and strikes out
at both the weak and the strong, the so-called developed and developing, with no
regard for national borders or GDP. In this sense, the world has neocolonized
itself—though, as ever, with disjunctive effects and severity depending on geogra-

If previous experiences with tracking down the source of viral epidemics and pandemics
53.
are any indication, it may take a decade or more to securely establish the source of COVID-19. It is
also possible that the source will never be fully established with complete certainty, yet most
researchers believe “natural” transmission to be more likely than laboratory origins. See Amy
Maxmen and Smritri Mallapaty, “The COVID Lab-Leak Hypothesis: What Scientists Do and Don’t
Know," Naturaleza 594, No. 7853 (2021), páginas. 313-15.

54.
Should the lab theory prove to be correct, it would nonetheless also implicate local contact
with and consumption of bats and other animals at markets, since the need to study novel coronaviruses
arises from the risks posed by endemic outbreaks connected to wild and domestic animals in the region.

55.

For a primer on this disease history, see https://www.surgeactivism.org/covid19.

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Zoonotic Undemocracy

phy, carrera, class, and political formations. Si, as one critical animal-studies scholar
has argued, we have waged war on the other species of this Earth, we are losing by
virtue of winning it so brutally and efficiently.56

One way out of this generalized neocolonial condition is to reenvision
democratic politics as posthumanist and multinatural. For the sake of the
human peoples of this Earth, the demos can no longer be limited to human peo-
ples alone. The public sphere would remain grounded in human reason and
emotion, it is hoped, with unconditional attention to difference, diversity, igual-
idad, and justice. All these democratic ideals, sin embargo, are clearly dependent on
the cooperation of a climate that either allows them to thrive or creates states of
emergency leading to their breaking down. Methane, carbon dioxide, global
calentamiento, forced human migrations, antibiotic resistance, superbugs, viruses,
droughts, fires, food insecurity, hambruna, diet-induced illnesses, land expropria-
ción, the persecution of activists as ecoterrorists, pollution, species extinction,
loss of biodiversity—all these play a role in democratic politics, directly and indi-
rectly, and in each case the animal-industrial complex (along with fossil fuels) es
a major driver of our worst-case scenarios.

Reconceptualizing the demos beyond “man” requires a disciplinary mix of
ecofeminist, decolonial, and posthumanist positions and critiques leading to vari-
ous forms of solidarity with nonhuman animals. Going beyond academic enclo-
sures, this will also require coalition-building among policy makers, artists, alimento-
empowerment initiatives, indigenous and racial-justice activists, animal ethicists,
and environmentalists. Unavoidably, the question of personal responsibility will
enter the picture, as will debates about the merits of individual versus collective
acción. Meireles, in an interview reflecting on the relative success of his Insertions
into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, claims that “it is practically impossible to
achieve anything on an individual scale through this work. The contribution of
each individual insertion is minor in comparison with the potential scale of the
work.”57 By this he means that a single intervention in the capitalist circuit, es decir.,
one artist’s détournement of one Coca-Cola bottle along its distribution chain, tiene
little effect in and of itself on the system (though the “potential” is there waiting to
be scaled up to a collective level). He does not say, sin embargo, that the individual act
is meaningless. Nor does he suggest that personal responsibility is a reactionary
ploy to displace blame or guilt. Without overvaluing the individual, Meireles
reveals that choosing between daily burdens and large-scale structural change is a
false choice. There is every reason to strive for both in tandem. Si, sin embargo,
Meireles’s work involved a textual undermining of corporate power by entering its
production line, the stakes of global warming, ecocide, and pandemics demand a
radical scaling back of the extraction of bodies, which means different approaches

56.

57.

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The War against Animals (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015).

Meireles and Mosquera, “Gerardo Mosquera in Conversation with Cildo Meireles," pag. 12.

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are necessary with respect to the animal-industrial complex. Primero, a negative
approach based on embargo: personal commitments to halting exploitive prac-
tices by not entering into the production line and refusing to consume animal bod-
ies and their extracted by-products (whenever possible), while pressuring political
entities and educational and cultural institutions to fully divest from these indus-
intentos. Segundo, a positive approach based on alternative modes of production and
the promotion of design, architecture, installation, food-art and empowerment
projects that realize a less violent relation to nonhuman animals and the environ-
mento. It is a potential mobilization that fits within Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent
imaginative proposal that academic and cultural workers strike in order to combat
imperialist oppression on multiple fronts.58 In the section “Imagine Going on
Strike: The Governed” she asks us to imagine “neuroscientists or other scientists
saying no to the anticipated glory at the completion of their research, porque
they question the right to keep apes or dolphins in captivity and treat them as
legitimate objects of scientific knowledge.”59 For similar reasons, one might imag-
ine the boards of directors of a major meat company redirecting their operations
away from animal exploitation, or museum directors and university presidents cut-
ting financial ties with intensive animal agriculture on their board of directors and
in their restaurants, or a mass social movement forcing these changes through a
general boycott of the animal-industrial complex. What does it say about our per-
ilous historical moment that these imaginings are utopian at the social level but
absolutely necessary at the environmental level? It means that in order to deceler-
ate climate devastation and push back against undemocratic global inequalities,
the cultivation of solidarity with nonhuman animals needs to become a historical
force on the world stage as never before.