This work brings together the names and visual representations of slaughterhouse machinery, revealing a dimension of industrial violence that often remains unseen. The names attributed to these machines — such as "head removal machine" and "foot and horn cutting unit" — neutralize acts of violence and death through the cold language of functionality.
The use of anatomical terms that apply to both animals and humans simultaneously recalls and conceals the proximity between species. The conceptual framework of the work is grounded in Carol J. Adams’s theory of the “absent referent.” Adams argues that the consumption of meat renders the original living being invisible, and that language plays a key role in this erasure.The glamorized naming of meat cuts — “fillet,” “filet mignon” — supports a distancing from the realities of death and the body.
This catalog, which includes over fifty machines used to kill industrially farmed animals, seeks to make visible one aspect of the linguistic and technological mechanisms that mediate the relationship between consumption and violence.