All posts tagged: Het Vergeten Dier

Animal activism with photos. An evening with Jo-Anne McArthur.

On Saturday October 17th, Belgian vegan organisation BE Vegan organised and evening with Canadian photographer Jo-Anne McArthur. In the vegan or animal rights community, Jo-Anne McArthur is well known for her work on the project We Animals, which resulted in a book with the same title. We Animals is a series of portraits of animals in the human environment: animals used for food production, clothing, experiments and companionship. We Animals is not just meant to be a series of portraits, there’s also a moral message. Taken from the We Animals website: We Animals aims to break down the barriers that humans have built which allow us to treat non-human animals as objects and not as beings with moral significance. The objective is to photograph our interactions with animals in such a way that the viewer finds new significance in these ordinary, often unnoticed situations of use, abuse and sharing of spaces. The photos are meant to make us question what is normal, and show it from the perspective of the animal. Some of her photos were also featured in the exhibit ‘Het …

Impressions from the photo exhibit ‘The Forgotten Animal’ in Bruges

Anyone who’s going from the station in Bruges to ‘t Zand in the coming week cannot miss this. There are about a dozen big bords with a photo on each side of a ‘forgotten’ animal in the food industry, with next to each photo a description of the fate of the animal. The photo exhibit is originally made by the Dutch organisations Varkens in Nood (Pigs in distress) and Dier en Recht (Animal & Law) and we already saw it in Amsterdam in 2013 (see our impression on our Dutch blog here). At that point, we wrote ‘Would this be possible on the Burg in Bruges or next to the Saint-Baafscathedral in Ghent?’. And now the exhibition is actually in Belgium, and in Bruges even! Fantastic! 🙂 The exhibit uses the same images as the ones that were used in the Netherlands, but the texts are adapted to the Belgian context. The Forgotten Animal is brought to Bruges by a cooperation of different organisations*, and can be seen for a week in the Albertpark.