FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD (2016)

This sound installation was created as part of the project Food Chain to represent the second consumer link of the human species food chain. In dialogue with five multisensory works that explore the blurred boundaries between man-food-animal, this sound installation condenses the structure of the Orwellian society and John Cage’s 4’33” to show that animal slaughter is as alarming, ruthless and chronic as human slaughter.

The slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad” constitutes Snowball’s condensation of the Seven Commandments of Animalism on the need for animal unity in the face of human oppression in Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this installation, “Four legs good, two legs bad” refers to the body posture that the public has to adopt in order to listen to the sound composition. This is because the headphones are fixed at 1.20mts which was the average height of the Homo Habilis, considered to be the oldest in the genus Homo. The sound composition merges the sonority of a pig’s slaughter with the noises produced when vomiting and beep supermarket sound effects to show humans as animals, animals as humans; animals as products, humans as products.