Industrial farming has reduced production costs to a bare minimum, allowing us to obtain meat at a negligible price, but to do so it has chosen to completely ignore the externalised costs that this system generates, such as the impact on the environment, on human health and on animal suffering. The meat industry does everything in its power to keep consumers away from intensive farms. To prevent them from seeing what really happens in those (non)places, because anyone who saw with their own eyes the horrors and cruelties perpetrated there would probably no longer want to be complicit in them.

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It is easy not to think about the suffering of farmed animals, about those anonymous and tragic existences that play out in those spaces, so far removed from us as to seem almost like worlds apart. Intensive farms now represent almost the only reality, yet most people have no opportunity to see them with their own eyes — which is why the testimonies of those who have managed to gain access are so important. Luca Santini and Matteo Natalucci, two young photographers, decided to witness for themselves what happens in intensive farms in Emilia-Romagna, in order to document the system underpinning the meat industry in Italy, and to tell the story in a photography book.

Giving animals a voice

The book is titled Blue, a term referring to "the combination between the feeling blue state of mind and the most extreme degree of meat cooking," the authors explained. To make it, Santini and Natalucci entered numerous intensive farms at night, without permission, with the help of the animal rights organisation Essere Animali. "Our work — the two photographers declared — wants to give voice to the deafening silence of millions of animals that are swallowed up every year by this gigantic machine, operated by us." Writer Wu Ming 2, a member of the eponymous collective, also joined the project, contributing a text that accompanies the raw photographs in the book.

[vimeo url="https://vimeo.com/384746620″]Video Cano Cristales[/vimeo]

Restoring the connections

Walking into an intensive farm, breathing in the desperation that permeates its windowless walls and being forced to reckon with a system that, in one way or another, concerns us all, cannot be easy. We asked Santini and Natalucci what struck them most about this experience — something they will never forget. "What probably impressed us most is the enormous number of animals crammed inside the sheds," they replied. "People have a distorted perception of these non-places; very few truly grasp the actual number of animals present. Paradoxically, in some Italian provinces there are more pigs than people. What we also find alarming is the fact that we have been completely weaned off the ability to connect a piece of meat to a living being, as if the two were entirely separate entities."

The campaign to bring the book to light

To publish and distribute the book, produced in a large tabloid format, the authors launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Produzioni dal basso platform. The goal is to raise five thousand euros; with more than a month still to go before the campaign ends, over 2,700 euros have already been raised. We believe this work deserves to be born and to circulate, to remind us of the horror that renews itself every day just a stone's throw from our homes, despite the calculated efforts of the meat industry to shape our imagination with misleading and sanitised advertising.

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As consumers, we have a duty to develop critical thinking, since the correlation between the ongoing environmental devastation and our diet can no longer be denied, and our choices can influence producers. "To date, we have reached a considerably more modest and mindful level of consumption – the two authors of Blue replied when we asked them whether, after everything they had witnessed, they would continue to consume animal products – respecting the product as much as possible and avoiding feeding into this system, which is unsustainable."