FORMAT

Performance, 45 mins

ARTIST

Iryna Zamuruieva

Elliot Hurst

We are convening a mourning ceremony for pigs that have died as a result of the African Swine Fever (ASF) pandemic. In the past two years over 100 million pigs have either lost their lives directly due to the virus or been killed as part of virus suppression efforts. We invite you to join the ceremony as fellow mourners, not observers.

How to participate is up to each fellow creature. There will be space for listening and remembering personal pig encounters; just being present is also fine. We aim to gently draw you into a collective project of multispecies mourning.

The ceremony doesn’t require any background knowledge, experience or readings. However there are a couple of things we would ask you to do, if possible:

There is no dress code, but we would invite you to choose a virtual background for our zoom call from this folder.
You could also bring along a candle (and something to light it with).

If you want to dig in further, you are welcome to root around the PIG RESPONSE PROJECT that this ceremony is part of.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Iryna Zamuruieva is an artist and cultural geographer. She works and walks across socially/ecologically engaged arts, co-creating experimental spaces for engaging with the more-than-human worlds. Most recently she’s been working on community led climate change adaptation in Scotland and investigating transformational creative practices (with a sustainability knowledge broker Sniffer), exploring non-hierarchical care structures (with Autonomous Care Unit collective) and curating a response structure for practicing careful pig-human relations (with the Pig Response Project). On occasion, Iryna can also be found writing, curating and photographing. Originally from a town in the middle of the Ukrainian steppe, Iryna is now living and working by the Scottish part of the North Sea coast.

elliot hurst is a researcher and facilitator, committed to multispecies anticolonial justice, and finding (expanding) the cracks in racist, capitalist patriarchal hegemony. His academic research focuses on water as a connective fluid sustaining social and ecological worlds. He is interested in creative research practices that engage in speculative world-making. Elliot grew up on a small farm in Aotearoa/New Zealand, on stolen Ngati Awa land, amongst ponds, sheep, cows, trees, eels etc. He is also involved in climate justice struggles and loves swimming, piano playing and food making