Sonichka, dear, I had such a pang recently.

Dear friends of AnimalFarm,

Welcome to issue no. 3 of The AnimalFarm Dispatch!

In the last dispatch I shared the usual, flat, polluted panorama from the train window during my commute from home to work. Trains move fast, so the zootechnical activities of the lowlands are just quick glimpses of warehouses, both sealed and open-air, one after the other, and of the ruins of older agricultural settlements. The logistics of zootechnics cannot be properly appreciated from a train cutting through the Po Valley at more than 200 km/h.

Some weeks later, due to a strike by the national train service, I had to take the car on a Monday morning to get to class in time (warm thanks to my mother for driving with me). As I drove between Bologna and Torino, I was fully confronted with the operational side of the zootechnical industry: dozens of trucks moving on the highway in both directions, at times full of bodies, at times empty, at times advertising meat and hot dogs, a continuous flow of commodified animal lives.

This logistic system operates in plain sight and is apparently so smooth that it is taken for granted and goes unseen: even my mother, usually quite sensitive to the exploitation of animals, silently accepted this ordinary state of affairs and stopped noticing the trucks after some time. Needless to say, my mood that Monday morning wasn’t particularly high already, due to the early wake-up, and the week started off quite depressingly.

As I was counting the trucks, I turned to the question recently posed in the last issue of COSE Spiegate bene, edited by the Italian newspaper Il Post: “Guarderemo con orrore a come trattiamo gli animali di cui ci nutriamo?” (Will we look on in horror at the way we treat the animals we eat?)

News from the farm

Some news for this month: a June full of calls for papers and events, before pretending to disappear into another galaxy over the summer (and writing the dreadfully scary Data Management Plan in July).

• the call for abstracts for the 2027 SAH conference in Chicago is still open! Please join me and Víctor Muñoz Sanz in our session on Zootechnical Architecture.

• the call for abstracts for the 9th International Congress of Construction History is open until June 28: please consider submitting proposals for the session “Building the Industrial Barn: A Construction and Zootechnical Industry”. The conference is for construction history enthusiasts and is organized by my brilliant colleagues from the Construction History Group at the Politecnico di Torino.

• if you are in Aarhus at the EAHN Conference, please reach out! You’ll find me and Víctor chairing the session on “Animal, Industry, and Labor” on Thursday 18 June.

Enough with conferences, but two more updates:

• thanks to Alice Morena for contributing to the AnimalFarm collection for Il Giornale dell’Architettura: she reflected on the territories of meat in the Po Valley, and the interdependence between the zootechnical industry and waterways in the province of Brescia (where there are more pigs than humans, according to some statistics).

• if you read Italian, in this month’s edition of L’indice dei libri del mese (a beautiful journal consisting only of book reviews) you can find a short article with a medley of book suggestions on architecture and factory farming (the piece is available behind a paywall to support the journal’s activities, but reach out for some informal sharing).

Currently on our table (AnimalFarm doesn’t eat meat, but books)

I’m always very glad when I can carve out time from the day-to-day endless flow of emails, and read. Thanks to a couple of long journeys (and despite the huge void left by Anna Karenina), this month I could read as much as I love to, and so I managed to catch up with some books that were long overdue on my reading list.

First, I must thank both Enrica Sangiovanni and Gianluca Guidotti (from the ArchivioZeta theatre company) and my colleague Tommaso Listo for suggesting the shattering letter written by Rosa Luxemburg to Sophie Liebknecht in December 1917 from the prison in Breslau where Luxemburg was held imprisoned. She describes the suffering of a buffalo, beaten, silenced, and in pain, with words that left me in tears as I was reading them on the train:

“You know their hide is proverbial for its thickness and toughness, but it had been torn. While the lorry was being unloaded, the beasts, which were utterly exhausted, stood perfectly still. The one that was bleeding had an expression on its black face and in its soft black eyes like that of a weeping child – one that has been severely thrashed and does not know why, nor how to escape from the torment of ill-treatment. I stood in front of the team; the beast looked at me: the tears welled from my own eyes. The suffering of a dearly loved brother could hardly have nursed me more profoundly, than I was moved by my impotence in face of this mute agony.”

The Italian edition of this letter includes an amazing short story by Joseph Roth on the St. Marx slaughterhouse in Vienna, which I couldn’t find in English, but which I highly recommend.

Luxemburg describes a buffalo that doesn’t react to the unjust pain provoked by humans. Conversely —and I must thank Giorgia Pagliuca for suggesting this book— Sarat Colling has brilliantly written on animals that resist, analyzing the political meaning of animals escaping from the walls of the farm, the chutes of the slaughterhouse, and the cages of the zoo. Their escapes are not the exceptions of extraordinary individuals: they are common acts of communication, interruption, and resistance against human-made borders, borders that “maintain a system that requires rendering bodies of sentient beings into products” (p. 5). When an animal escapes, she often makes it to the local news, and this usually promotes feelings of empathy. Colling asks: “How do we move from individual specific stories and lives that matter to the abstracted population that fosters apathy?” (p. 10)

I ask: How can we feel empathy for the billions of confined animals worldwide?

(Talking about empathy and escapes, I recently watched Hen by György Pálfi).

Colling also writes: “The Earth has been made into a global animal farm, wreaking havoc on the environment” (p. 34). These days, as a heatwave has struck Northern Italy with extremely high temperatures and it is not even astronomically summer yet, these words are heavier than usual. I was sad to hear that Colling passed away in 2025. For Italian readers, there is a good translation of Colling’s book, edited by feminoska and Marco Reggio and published by Mimesis.

Finally, encouraged by the great talk given by Mariachiara Ficarelli in our AnimalFarm seminar series back in May, I’ve recently started The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, by Kathryn Gillespie, which had been waiting on my desk for so long. Gillespie writes about the commodified life of dairy cows in the US farming system and reflects on the slow violence found in the routine, day-to-day practices of the dairy industry. She also hints at the subtle violence of architectural design.

From Gillespie’s interview with a farmer:

“Lameness is also common. That’s when cows develop a bad limp or can’t put weight on a leg. You see lameness most when cows are housed on concrete.” Homer pointed into the barn, “See, there, the barn is cement flooring. We have cement in there because it’s so much better for keeping things clean. It’s easy to wash and clear out the manure. But cement is hard on them. And sometimes it can be slippery—if you can kind of see from here,” he said, pointing again at the cement floors, “There’s grooves in the cement. That’s to keep the cows from slipping. It gives more traction. If you have floors without grooves, those get extra slippery and the animals can fall and injure themselves, which is one thing that can make them lame. Injury, I mean.”

I nodded, urging him to continue.

“But then it’s also just hard on their legs and hooves to stand on cement, so we try to make sure they have options.”

In the CONVIVIUM show, still running at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich until October, we tried to explore the technofixes that apparently make cows more comfortable in the same environment that commodifies them.

Until next time,

Sofia/ERC AnimalFarm

Cover image: Hen, a movie by György Pálfi, 2025.