ex-Mattatoio
/ the herd
Mattatoio is a huge complex in the district of Testaccio.
It used to be the city's abattoir and is now in the process
of moving toward being a cultural space. The installation
"the herd" by Gillian McIver, Julian Ronnefeldt
and Sandrine Albert, was a site response to the space. Among
other things, it offered a remembrance of the original use
of the site. At the same time the piece, in representing the
cattle herd and a repeated image of a cow portioned into butcher's
cuts and shrink-wrapped, draws attention to the growing distance
between natural functions - such as sourcing and preparing
food - into the contemporary standardized supermarket product.
The Mattatoio complex once butchered and prepared thousands
of animals, employing hundreds of local people, the smell
in the area would have been pervasive. Today we increasingly
get our meat in wrapped, undistinguishable packages, a uniform
mass of flesh.
The work therefore also offers a kind of warning to those
who seek to develop the site: please avoid institutionalising
it into a series of strictly demarcated zones. To turn this
site onto a structure holding institutions, without a free
zone of interactions bringing everything together, would be
to give into the supermarket model of standardized and in
some cases pre-prepared experience. We made this work in the
hope that the space is regenerated with an element of organic
development, with free space for activity and dialogue with
and around the city's artists, thinkers and the local community.
This work was created specifically for the exhibition “l’età
nomade” curated by Giovanna Dalla Chiesa, dell'Accademia
di Belle Arti di Roma. The installation used materials found
on the site of this ex-slaughterhouse, such as metal hooks
and other disused objects. It was installed in the yard between
two cattle-holding stalls.
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