“Upon entry to De Ateliers’ main exhibition hall, one may encounter a lingering smell that recalls a pigsty, But this isn’t an ordinary hog aroma. Bart Houwers has built, with the help of a network of farmers, thirty-eight pigpens and a confined feeding system which is activated twice daily and refills itself for the duration of the show. Sourced from a Dutch international animal nutrition company, pig feed is a central player in Houwers’ relational study of machine and mouth. The pig industry in the Netherlands is currently shrinking – a consequence of stricter environmental legislation policy linked to curbing odour and nitrogen emissions. With the Nitrogen Fund (Stikstoffonds) program, the government had made €25 billion available in subsidies to support sustainability, relocation or termination. Reflecting on his own biographical story (Houwers comes from the Dutch countryside, from a family of farmers) and, to some extent, the biographical story of the Netherlands, Houwers traces intensive farming and interrogates origin stories of pig feed – its composition and manufacturing, oftentimes sourced from sites in the Global South, but also its relationship to confined feeding systems and the regulations of the industry on his home turf. His installation is composed of steel equipment sought out and borrowed from different farmers, each of whom have participated in the Nitrogen Fund program. Each component corresponds to the standardisation and policy mandates dictated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, pointing to the inextricable relation between the compound feed and machine. Standards and regulations effectuate the harnessing of this artwork that is formed in common bond and with collective hands. The work reveals the interconnectedness of scales, impacted with guilt and loss, both planetary and systemic.”
Written and curated by Jennifer Teets.
The installation was part of Offspring 2024 ‘Underbelly’ at De Ateliers.

On June 8, the Dutch environmental historian and historian of science Floor Haalboom gave a lecture in response to the installation 'Feeding Operation' titled: Feeding the world. "The places pigs live in are often invisible, just like the places behind the dusty stuff they eat. What does the world behind Bart Houwers’ Feeding Operation look like?"

Floor Haalboom is an environmental historian and historian of science at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Utrecht University. In the Underbelly lecture series, she talks about her Dutch Research Council-funded project ‘What does your meat eat? The global impact of Dutch livestock feed from 1954 up to the present’.

The lecture has been recorded and can be viewed here: