To the other end – Project about the live export of Australian sheep

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In total we spun 20 balls of wool and we knotted around 11000 knots. We worked on the carpet for almost two weeks with an average speed of 1 centimetre a day. So far we did 13 cm in total and we still have to do 121 cm.

Yesterday we went to Darren’s shearing shed. He usually kills one or two sheep every month, to provide food for the sheep shearers that work for him. Darren is a shearing contractor, one of the best in the area, so people told us. We asked him if we could come along the next time he was going to slaughter a sheep.

He selected two sheep (wethers), a crossbreed and a Merino. “Both good and fat” was his opinion. First he killed the Merino. He cut his throat and broke his neck at the same time. The animal died immediately but his muscles still moved for half a minute. Darren let the dead body bleeding for a while. After all life floated out of the body, he started to skin the animal. Behind him the other sheep was waiting for his turn. Every now and then you could hear him sighing.

Darren hung the body on a hook and took out the fat and the offal and collected it on top of the skin of the sheep. He bound the legs together in a cross, so the skin turned into a bag. He killed the crossbreed as well and he put both carcasses in the back of his car. We followed him to his house where he hung both in his walk-in freezer. It will hang there for a week before he cuts it into pieces of meat.

Last week we made the design of the carpet that we will use for this project. Instead of using the Bahluli funery rug as an inspiration for an alternative design with local elements and symbols, we decided to copy the original carpet as close as possible. We traced the outlines of all the different shapes on the carpet and made this drawing that will be our guideline for the coming weeks. We already started knotting the first couple of centimetres.

The context

Our project ‘To the other end’ (worktitle) deals with the issue of the live-export of sheep from West Australia to the Middle East. We’re interested in this trade that links one locality to another locality and causes discussions about morality. Our aim is to visually connect both cultures together. We want to create an image that can be understood in both cultures.

Australia is the biggest exporter of live sheep to the Middle East. 80% of this export comes from farms in the rural areas of Western Australia. The Wheatbelt region is one of the nine regions of Western Australia. Altogether, it has an area of 154,862 square kilometers and a population of about 72,000 people. The population is widely distributed. The Wheatbelt encompasses a range of environments and industries. The sheep industry is next to the wheat production one of the biggest industries of this region.

Sheep truck on the road to Perth

We got interested in the fact that a lot of sheep get transported to the Middle East in the so-called live export trade. The major markets for Australian sheep are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. Other key markets are Bahrain, the UAE, Oman and Qatar. Australia sends more than four million live sheep every year to the Middle East, a journey during which three sheep share one square meter of space in the ship’s hold. The journey from West Australia to the Middle East takes around 2 – 5 weeks, making it the longest journey animals have to endure anywhere in the world. Live animals are required for religious and cultural reasons. Muslims want to slaughter the animals in a Halal manner.

Sheep are trucked in from around Western Australia into a feedlot in Perth, where they are sorted for loading. Animals are then trucked from the feedlot to one of the Fremantle ports in multi story trucks. At the port animals are packed into multi-storey vessels. These vessels are load on the ship before they leave to the Middle East.

Ship used for the live export of sheep

The concept

In ‘To the other end’ we want to visualize the journey of the sheep in order to raise questions about  cultural differences in the approach of the product and how this influences the trade relationship and the discussions about the live-export. We came to the understanding that the live export is quite a sensitive topic in Western Australia. The animal welfare groups are actively protesting against it but all people working in the industry want to maintain the trade-relationship because of economic reasons. For our research we approached several people working in the industry for an interview. Most of the times our requests were rejected because they doubted our integrity.

Therefore we feel the need to initiate an action that is not an explicit statement but certainly confronts the audience with the ethical discussion about responsibility. We choose to visualize the journey of the sheep by creating a journey on its own. We will knot a rug of the wool of sheep. This rug will be exported to Bahrain. Bahrain is an important harbor for the live export and the base for most of Australian traders located in the Middle East.

We will buy a ram at the market in Bahrain and ask someone to slaughter a sheep Halal on the carpet during ‘Eid Al Adha’, an Islamic sacrifice feast that will take place in Bahrain in September 2010. It is a time when people buy animals to sacrifice at their homes, creating peak demand for Australian sheep. This slaughter  will leave bloodstains on the carpet. The bloodstains will be the evidence of the death of the sheep. The next step of the journey will be to import this evidence in Australia in order to bring the blood back to its ‘origin’. The stories, the documents and the images that we will collect during the whole process will be the eventual work. All of this information will eventually lead to a publication that will be released at the Biennal in Perth in 2011. The carpet is designed as a tool for communication between the two different localities.

This year about 4 million will be exported to the Middle East, 700,000 of them are going to Bahrain. The Australian livestock industry has staff in Bahrain to help the Bahrain Livestock Company educate locals and enforce new rules. Their aim is to improve the animal welfare standards in the Middle East in order to limit the protests against the live export.

One of the new campaigns of the Bahrein Livestock Company

During the celebration of Eid al-Adha, Muslims commemorate and remember Abraham’s trials, by themselves slaughtering an animal such as a sheep, camel, or goat. One of Abraham’s main trials was to face the command of Allah to kill his only son. Upon hearing this command, he prepared to submit to Allah’s will. When he was all prepared to do it, Allah revealed to him that his sacrifice had already been fulfilled because a sheep died. He had shown that his love for his Lord superceded all others and that he would lay down his own life or the lives of those dear to him in order to submit to God. At the end of the ‘Hajj’ pelgrimage to Mecca the pilgrims perform a ritual of animal sacrifice, and celebrate the three day global festival of Eid al-Adha.

Examples of postcards to celebrate Eid-Al-Adha

A slaughter of a sheep during the annual feast of sacrifice

Allah has given human beings power over animals and allowed people to eat meat, but only if people are pronouncing his name at the solemn act of taking life. Muslims slaughter animals in the same way throughout the year. By saying the name of Allah at the time of slaughter, Muslims are reminded that life is sacred.

The meat from the sacrifice of Eid al-Adha is mostly given away to others. One-third is eaten by immediate family and relatives, one-third is given away to friends, and one-third is donated to the poor. The act symbolizes the willingness of Muslims to give up things that are of benefit to them or close to their hearts, in order to follow Allah’s commands. It also symbolizes their willingness to give up some of their own bounties, in order to strengthen ties of friendship and help those who are in need.

After slaughtering the sheep on the rug during the celebration of Eid al-Adha we want to bring the object back to Australia. This will not be easy as Australia has one of the strictest quarantine policies. Importing a rug with blood on it will be problematic, even when the blood is from an Australian sheep. Quarantine doesn’t only relate to medical and public health policy, or even just to immigration policy, it’s also very bound up with economic and political policy. Quarantine borders, just like national borders, are seeking to draw a line between us and them, inside and outside, desirable and undesirable, and so on. Bringing the blood back to its origin raises interesting questions about responsibility and identity.

The object

The composition and the design of the carpet will be based on the design of a Persian carpet, the ones called Baluch rugs. These are tribal rugs, hand woven, made in the southern part of Iran by nomadic Baluch tribes. These nomads weave these rugs mainly to express themselves and follow an ancient Persian tradition, which dates back 2500 years. They frequently have either an overall pattern, or a prayer design. Any Baluch carpet is one of a kind and has absolutely no duplicates anywhere. Furthermore we like these carpets because of the fact that Nomads made these Baluch rugs; these carpets are meant to travel.

Bahluli funerary rug, Afghan Sistan, mid 19th century

In the frames around the ‘field’ (middle section of the carpet) we will use patterns symbolizing the live of a sheep that is raised in Western Australlia. We will use for example symbols like: wheat, shearing combs, the seeds you find in the fleeces, fences, eat tags, knifes etc. The rug will be made of wool that we spun ourselves and it will be unwashed and undyed wool (black and white). The rug will smell like sheep and the lanolin, the dirt and the seeds will still be visible. We are now working on the design of the carpet that will be based on the design of the ‘Bahluli funeral rug’.