Unwashed and undyed wool made from Australian sheep
Start of production Carpet, Lake Grace, Australia, December 2009
End of production carpet, Bahrain, November 2010
Slaughter of Australian sheep on carpet in Bahrain during "Festival of Sacrifice"
Slaughter of Australian sheep on carpet in Bahrain during "Festival of Sacrifice"
TO THE OTHER END
We started the project with the production a Persian carpet in Lake Grace, Australia. With help from local farmers and crafts people we learned how to shear a sheep and card and spin wool. From the wool we produced a black and white copy of a Baluchi funeral carpet. After a year of knotting we completed the carpet and took it with us on a trip to Bahrain during the feast of sacrifice in November 2010. On a local cattle market we searched for an Australian sheep from Lake Grace. When we identified one through the code on the ear tag, we asked a local family to sacrifice the sheep on our carpet during the feast. They organized a butcher who executed the religious ritual on their behalf in front of their house. After the butcher anatomized the sheep with great skill, the meat was distributed among the poor. Our aim was to send the bloodstained carpet back to the Australian farm where the sheep was raised, but it got rejected during customs inspection. We took the carpet to the Netherlands and are still in process of sending it to Australia.
‘To the other end’ deals with the live export of millions of sheep that are transported by enormous boats from Western Australia to different countries in the Middle East. In this project we focus on the connection between Lake Grace, a small town in the wheatbelt region of Western Australia, and Bahrain, a small island country located in the Persian Gulf. The journey across the Indian ocean takes around five weeks, making it the longest export journey animals undergo anywhere in the world. The livestock export is part of a globalized network of trade relationships. We want to research the gap in cultural understanding between the two localities in order to humanize the formalized and depersonalized global market.
There is a general assumption that there is a huge demand for live sheep for religious purposes in the Middle East. According to an Islamic rule Muslims are only allowed to eat meat when it is ritually slaughtered. In Australia there are many Halal abattoirs but the ‘Australian Livestock Company’ arguments that Muslims don’t trust these slaughterhouses and prefer the live-import above the import of chilled meat. This is not the only reason that explains the existence of the export. Huge ocean vessels can carry hundreds of thousands live sheep in a relatively affordable manner, whereas the small-scale refrigerated air transport is too expensive and inefficient.
A drawback for the livestock exporters and their lucrative business is that it has been severely criticized by international animal welfare activists. These organizations call the journey of the sheep unbearable and claim that thousands of animals die during the voyage due to stress, injuries and infection. According to them, the animals that survive the long journey are subjected to gruesome handling and slaughter methods, which are illegal in Australia. In response to these protests of the activists, the ‘Australian Livestock Company’ started up a campaign in order to educate the locals of the importing countries how to treat animals. It’s the absurdity of this imperialist interference that made us decide to research the live sheep export.
