SLAUGHTERHOUSE

   In the last few decades, the emphasis on humane animal slaughter led to the sanitized reframing of the slaughterhouse as a meat plant and the slaughter floor as a harvest floor. As the quintessential modern architecture of industrialized slaughter, the harvest floor is defined by precision, unrelenting forward movement, and efficiency. This representational shift is meant to re-represent the act of slaughter from an act of gruesome violence to a humane productive endeavor. By using the harvest floor as a synecdochal device, SLAUGHTERHOUSE approaches this representational shift as an invitation to grapple with the necropolitical affordances of technologies of precision and efficiency across sites of industrial extraction, scientific innovation, and military intervention which labor in the name of liberal values, such as humanity, progress, freedom, democracy, and growth.
    This exhibition traces how the interrelations between the harvest floor’s architectural manifestations of liberal humanism(/humane-ness/humanity) and technologies of precise slaughter, irreversible forward movement, and crowd control proliferate beyond the walls of the meat plant through the intimate coupling of drone bombing, automated oil drilling, industrialized food production, monocrop cultivation, and genetic encoding, just to name a few. Ultimately, SLAUGHTERHOUSE foregrounds the ways in which precise slaughter functions as the backbone of racial capitalism.