Saeborg wishes to explore and overcome the conceptions about our body and our identity. For this purpose, the artist creates fantastic full-body costumes and has crafted a colourful utopia in which even the farm animals at the bottom of the food chain can live happily together.

In this bucolic and titillating display of humanised farm animals, each of whom has its own purpose and function in the closed rural economy, visitors and female livestock are separated by a fence. Those within the fence go about their routines as those on the outside look in. But just how real is the separation between those on the inside and those who watch?

A mixture of playful sexuality of toy-like mascots and meaningful biological reality pushes the audience out of their comfort zone with the help of detailed Japanese character cuteness. Dressed in a tight-fitting inflatable costume, made from flexible materials, Saeborg frees herself from the powerful binds of traditional projections of the social role of women in Japan and corresponding etiquettes of behaviour. 

‘SlaughterHouse’ is an ongoing project in constant expansion and evolution depending on each context. It explores the possibilities for healthy coexistence between humans and other living organisms as one of the urgencies that artists in the wake of COVID-19 and ongoing global warming are investigating.

In Lisbon, the installation performance will be activated by performers from Japan together with local performers. Each activation invites the audience to engage themselves in a celebration of relationships of a new kind.

The installation, activated through this performance, can also be visited on Friday and Saturday between 10:00 and 17:00 and on Sunday between 10:00 and 15:00, at the CAM Studio.

Engawa – A Season of Contemporary Art from Japan

‘Engawa’ is a programming that brings to Lisbon a set of creators from Japan and the Japanese diaspora, many of them for the first time in Portugal. More info