Three little pigs were stolen from an art exhibition in Copenhagen over the weekend after a provocative artist said he would be allowed to starve and die from an art exhibition in Copenhagen.
Artist Marco Evaristti said in an interview Monday that his exhibition, “And Now You Care?”, is intended to “waken Danish society” to pig abuse, pointing to statistics that tens of thousands of pigs die every day due to poor conditions.
“I have a certain voice as an artist who talks about this,” said Evaristo, 62. “So I'll share my thoughts on what I think about treatments for animals in Danish.”
The exhibition, which opened Friday in the former butcher warehouse in Copenhagen's meatpacking district, included three live piglets covered in two shopping carts in a straw mountain. Large paintings of Danish flags and slaughtered pigs were hung on the wall.
The pigs that were given water but had no food were expected to live up to five days. Evaristti said he would not eat or drink until the show was over.
But the pig did not die. They disappeared.
Evaristoty, born in Chile, said that members of animal rights groups began checking out piglets while the exhibition space was being cleaned on Saturday morning. Shortly after they left, the theft took place.
“They closed the door while the cleaning people were cleaning the toilet,” he said, adding that the door had been unlocked. “Four minutes later they came out and it wasn't a pig.”
A Copenhagen police spokesman said he was notified of the theft just before noon on Saturday and that no one had been charged. Evaristo, who said he and his family were under many threats, does not expect the piglet to be returned.
Animal rights groups are split into Evaristti's latest exhibitions, some agree with his message, but not his method or presentation. Reviews from Danish newspapers denounced the exhibition as “old-fashioned avant-garde.”
Anima International Denmark's campaign manager, Matthias Madsen, said in a statement that the organization reported Evaristo to police when it announced plans to starve pork.
“This would violate several sections of the Danish Animal Welfare Act and we wanted the authorities to prepare to intervene,” Madsen said, adding that the strong public response to the exhibition is a reminder of people feeling unacceptable animals.
According to the Danish Agricultural Food Council, around 5,000 pig farms in Denmark produce around 28 million pigs a year. Many are slaughtered, and over 70% of the pork is exported to countries within the European Union.
Birgit Dam, the chief livestock consultant and animal protection Danish mink, said about 25,000 piglets die every day in Danish stables.
“We fully understand digging, frustration and even anger over the ongoing abuse of millions of pigs in the Danish pig industry,” Dam said of the Evaristoty exhibition. “This has been going on for decades and is completely unacceptable. But three individual piglets cannot suffer to make our point.”
Evaristti said his idea for the exhibition came from reading a newspaper article on the topic around October. “I knew something was wrong in Denmark, but I didn't know it was that bad,” he said.
On Monday night he faced an important question: What now? He said piglet-free exhibitions will be “boring” and “plastic” before closing Tuesday completely.
“If you take your mind from your body, you cannot exist only as a soulless body,” he said. “My exhibitions don't have a soul anymore. It's just a body, and I'm not interested in expressing my body. I want a body and soul.”
