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munoz sanz solitude 3 Victor Munoz Sanz

munoz sanz solitude 4 Victor Munoz Sanz

Genes, Robots, and Toxicity: the Haunted Landscapes of Milk Production (2020)
Victor M. Sanz

This essay looks into the relationship between humans, architecture, landscape, technology, and Dutch dairy cattle, which of course involves exploitation and cruelty. In it, I aim to think along how we stopped caring about our cows as companions and how to move forward. Introducing the concept of cow’s Five Freedoms – freedom from hunger, discomfort, pain, and stress, and to express their natural behavior, he exposes these codes that were released from the UK Farm Welfare Council in the nineteen-sixties as one reason to justify automated solutions for dairy farming. Today, with increasing ammonia emissions, the industry with its violent modern reproduction methods along with its automated barns is confronted with demands from NGOs for drastic measures: cutting the farm-animal population by half to protect nature and biodiversity. With that, agricultural policies and milk industry’s battle against its own ghosts and monsters, I argue, is clashing with the interests of the animals involved, calling for renewed strategies for degrowth and cross-species coexistence, with lots of accountability and imagination.

 

Bio Víctor Muñoz Sanz is an assistant professor at TU Delft. His research focuses on the implications for architecture of technological transitions. Muñoz Sanz was a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, and fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Prior to that, he was coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, co-principal researcher of ‘Automated Landscapes’ at Het Nieuwe Instituut, and Emerging Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is the co-editor of Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (2020) and an editor of the journal Footprint. His research on Automated Landscapes was exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2018.

2020, Softcover, stapled, 133 pages in total

Title Solitude Journal #1: Collective Care and Response-ability
Author Various
Editor Denise Helene Sumi
Publisher Akademie Schloss Solitude