Materiality

Chicken Shit/Cachu Iar.

09.07.26

Outputs:
Interactive Map

Tags:
Agriculture
Pollution
Rivers

Notes:
Collaboration with Daniel Carey.
Comissioned by Sustain, Compassion In World Farming, and Friends of the Earth.
Description:
Chicken Shit / Cachu Iar investigated the factory farming supply chain by linking the white stripes of fat in chicken breasts to the occurrence of algal blooms. Using multimedia evidence — algae imagery sourced from social media and mapped by date and location, a 3D model built from a single farm photograph, and architectural drawings of stocking density — we traced and reconstructed the points where harm occurs in the industrial flow of nutrients. Farm location data from CPRE and Friends of the River Wye was used to map the fields most at risk of nutrient pollution.

Design:
A multimedia investigation combining 3D models, architectural drawings and risk maps. The investigation starts with two images, a chicken breast from Tesco and an algae bloom on the River Wye, providing the starting point for two nutrient trails, protein and phosphate respectively. Two colours are used throughout the exhibited work to signpost the nutrients, taken from these starting images.

The investigation assembled images of environments affected by the flow of nutrients, from plant tissue to soy plantations. The factory farm was reconstructed as a response to industry push back on animal rights investigations and was modelled in accordance with the specifications of a higher welfare chicken shed. This allowed us to visualise the scale and intensity of factory farming, even when it is carried out to best practice standards. Building a physical model gave a true sense of scale, something that photographs miss because chicken sheds are too long and extend past a camera’s vanishing point.

Publication:
Hay Literature Festival (exhibition)
St Anne's House Bristol (exhibition)
Goldsmiths, University of London (exhibition)
Farmerama Radio (podcast)
Dark Mountain Journal (book chapter)
Protest Architecture, Nick Newman (book illustration)
Oxford Real Farming Conference (presentation)
European Permaculture Community Forum (presentation)

“Shows the sheer scale and horror of pollution from these farms” / Kerry McCarthy MP //

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