Exhibiting Livestock Environments: Health, Colonialism, Bodies, and Labor

Despite the billions of domesticated animals farmed worldwide, the spaces in which farming occurs are still little known and have been largely overlooked by architecture historiography. Nevertheless, the environmental turn within architectural history and culture has promoted a new awareness of livestock infrastructure and its controversial features. This shift is particularly evident in a series of recent architectural and artistic exhibitions, which I explore in this essay. More precisely, I look into the following exhibitions: Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal, October 2011–April 2012); Land. Milk. Honey. Animal Stories in Imagined Landscapes, curated by Dan Hasson, Iddo Ginat, Rachel Gottesman, Yonatan Cohen, and Tamar Novick (Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021); Víctor Muñoz Sanz’s contribution to the exhibition From Raster to Vector: The Netherlands as Profit Landscape (Radius Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology, Delft, May–August 2024); and finally, Unleash Your Herd Potential, an artistic project curated by Dániel Szalai and exhibited in various locations in 2022 and 2023. Dealing with bodies, health concerns, colonial projects, automated labor, and technologies, these exhibitions fostered new visions of livestock as actors with historical and space-making agency, and they may help us reconsider our relationship with the industrial production of animal bodies.