The sound of 73 pigs dying

A raw field recording from a slaughterhouse, 30 min, 2022.

After leaving the microphones in the exterior part of the slaughterhouse and walking away, a worker came to clean up the area. He came to clean just in front of the microphones, but the microphones were placed on the other side of a metal fence. He checked the microphones. Then other colleagues came over and discussed until a new truck arrived full of pigs to be slaughtered. Suddenly, a worker said, laughing, ‘They’ve grown again!’ The workers went back inside the slaughterhouse. Then another truck full of live pigs arrived to be slaughtered. It took a while for the truck to come off the scale. The truck driver was listening to music. Later on, a man from the slaughterhouse approached me to ask what I was doing there and if I was part of this ‘new contemporary sect called veganism.’ After that, he explained to me that ‘the pigs are not suffering at all. What we listen to is just part of a process that usually occurs when they reunite because the pigs are a hierarchical society and they’re fighting with each other.’ He then asked me to stop the recording.

This slaughterhouse kills around 3,500 pigs in a day.

The recording was made in collaboration with Ivonne Villamil in February 2022 during a residency in Cal Gras, a lovely place for artistic residencies situated in a small village in Catalunya.