Monument to the Unknown Animals

The Monument to the Unknown Animals is a work that reflects on the condition of animals whose lives are crushed by the dynamics of the global economy. Utilizing diverse idioms and imagery in his works, Carlo Caloro focuses on various details of the complex mechanism activating the dynamics of man’s relationship with nature and the mutual conflicts inherent to it. In this work, he freezes and immortalizes the bodies of animals intensively born and bred, slaughtered whole and ready for sale, as if seen in a black and white photograph. They are concrete casts from silicon moulds that reproduce carcasses, cadavers of lambs, chickens, ducks and rabbits presented in their animal nudity as bodies destined from birth to be inserted into the crushing food production chain. The artist’s reflection starts from the fauna typical of Torre Flavia constituted mainly by wild birds, a category constituting, according to global statistics, some 30% of the total number of birds on the planet, with the remaining 70% being farmed poultry. Among the population of mammals, 60% are farm animals (cattle and swine), 36% are humans, and just 4% are wild mammals. As the title indicates, the work is intended as a commemorative as well as a sepulchral monumentum for the animals belonging to the sphere of intensive farming that almost constitute a separate species with respect to their so-called ‘wild’ counterparts. Thus, the group of grey bodies stands out in the Macchiatonda reserve, suspended on slender pedestals like a mass of corpses floating in mid-air to remind us of the discordant complexity of a system that feeds on internal contradictions. The work aims at underscoring the animal presence in its full bodily dignity, denouncing the global economic attitude promoting all types of intensive farming regardless of its devastating consequences to ecosystems and the breeding of animal diseases. From this point of view the work assumes a commemorative presence, as well as representing a memento mori in which man feels called into question as the motor of anthropic actions that, with the devastation of ecosystems and expansion of intensive breeding farms, trigger processes of cross-species transmission, the development and spread of illnesses between the animal and human species.