SOW has a belly that is worryingly big, she is obviously exhausted and her tired body is evidence of the many breeding cycles she had to endure to produce piglets. Sometimes she is asleep, sometimes she twitches her ears or moves her tail, blinks her eyes and huffs. Sometimes she squeals and screams a painful loud scream.
SOW is a digital sculpture that can be visible in the locations that are part of the UK’s industrial pork supply chain via SOW AR app.
SOW - a female breeding pig - makes the invisible industrial pork supply chain visible and grapples with its complexity.
SOW emerged from an ongoing art/research collaboration and is founded on the shared knowledges of industrial meat production that aim to recognise and honour the individual agency and power of industrially farmed pigs. The project was developed by Naho Matsuda and A Drift of Us collective as part of the Greenpeace project, Bad Taste.
SOW invites you to visit the locations where she appears and contemplate the many industrially farmed pigs that you cannot see and the one that you can: what is your relationship to them and to her? What would you like to say to SOW and what kind of future does she have? How much do you know about how pigs are bred in the UK - and how much do you want to know?
SOW is a project by Naho Matsuda and A Drift of Us and has been developed as part of the Greenpeace project, Bad Taste.
Naho Matsuda is a visual artist based in London. Her practice is socially-engaged and situated, often involving local people, public places and the natural environment. Naho works collaboratively with specialists from other disciplines, and for SOW has been exploring and translating the impacts of industrial pork production together with A Drift of Us.
Naho works with installations, print, drawings and video and has exhibited internationally including: SXSW in Austin TX, You & AI with Onassis Foundation in Athens GR, Qatar British Festival with the British Council in Doha QA, Great Exhibition of the North in Newcastle UK. Her solo exhibition ‘The Hardest Word’ is currently on show at the Kunsthalle in Kempten, Germany.
A Drift of Us is a UK-based interdisciplinary collective questioning the established norms of food production and re-evaluating the position of multiple species through an eco-feminist perspective. Originating in 2022, A Drift of Us has focused on pigs in the context of an industrial farm and the wider socio-political conditions that structure pig lives. Using meat production as a focus, they combine art, speculative design, multispecies studies and political economy to explore the potential for a socio-environmental transformation through play and provocation. A ‘drift’ is the collective noun for a group of pigs or hogs. We believe that it reflects the playful, carefree and somewhat chaotic nature of the animals: roaming freely, spontaneously in various directions yet sticking together as a group.