Francesc Ruiz’s project 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days tackles the frictions which occur between animal exploitation, the food and tannery industries, logistics infrastructures, and the natural environment in the plain of Vic and its surrounding areas. The project opens up the already-existing imaginaries drawn from the history of comics, alternative hentai, and anti-speciesist feminism.
At ACVIC we can find a mural which covers the entirety of the two main rooms, where shmoos—a fictional animal species originally created by comic book artist Al Capp in the 1940s—run through the landscapes of the meat industry in the region, the farms, the C-25 motorway, the Balenyà slaughterhouses, the Gurb estate, the Ter river.
Shmoos are characterised by abundance, providing humans with eggs, bottled milk, and butter, and lovingly self-sacrifice so their delicious flesh can be cooked and eaten. Shmoos reproduce very quickly, and are an unlimited natural resource. Their abundance, however, destabilises the logic of capitalism: you do not need to consume, nor need you work in order to feed yourself. The shmoos signify a full-blown food utopia.
In the adjacent room, we find the artwork which gives the exhibition its title, a calendar that dates only three months, three weeks, and three days, representing the duration of a sow’s pregnancy. The calendar is illustrated with sexualised images of a shmoo in the manner of an alternative hentai, and accompanied by feminised proteins, those derived from processes of animal gestation such as milk, eggs, and butter, in a reference to one of the classic texts of anti-speciesist feminism “The sexual politics of the flesh” by Carol Adams.
