Maria Sewcz

The Berlin-based photographer of mostly urban structures was asked to search for the presence of the pig in the urban environment. Her pictures show it in portions, roasted, cooked, in aspic, etc. They also show interventions in what we commonly perceive as nature along with seemingly incidental, yet central pictorial commentaries, such as the Bremen, for example, the Bremen Town Musicians, a band of animals in solidarity, resisting human consumer economies.

Fahim Amir – another contributor to this volume – writes in detail about the non-human animal as an agent of resistance in his book Schwein und Zeit¹. Another author, Jenny Schäfer, draws attention to the way in which the consumption of meat accompanies and shapes biographies. It is touching when she reports how, for example, the bacon in the fridge of her grandmother, who had personally experienced existential hunger, can evoke feelings of security. Discussions about meat are directly linked to questions of distributional justice. The standard daily requirements laid down in the Social Code under the heading Food, Beverages and Tobacco are currently 5 euros for adults living alone, 3 and 3.93 euros for children and 5.34 euros for 15- to 18-year-olds.² How does this relate to the profits of the food industry and retail, and this in turn to the prices paid to farm producers for their work?

Using her mobile phone, Sewcz takes photographs in the aesthetics of the mostly spectacularly staged, approval- seeking Instagram food porn. But “glamorous” in these photographs is at best the setting or rising sun, which seems to be regulated by a human hand – an image of the superimposition of cosmic beauty and human presumption. Sewcz points out that she was accompanied in this project by the concept of “consumption”. It denotes such diverse issues as the use of goods, tuberculosis and the drinking of the fragments of the host dissolved in communion wine.