Central market, saturday, 10:30am. Meat area: beef, pork, chicken, between others.
This is the place in which I have decided to take my pictures, this is where I find myself now. There aren't many people around, it's still early. The halls here are quite fetid. I walk through them and realize why is that smell here: I see, hanging from iron hooks, animal corpses. You can find them complete or only their separated limbs.
Chickens are mostly full, still with their heads. Tight eyes closed, wrinkled skin, open necks. Clotted blood falls from some of their beaks. If they were alive, I would think they are agonizing of impotence.
I keep finding disturbing scenes while I walk: pork corpses with their entire bodies, except for the heads. They are, as well as chickens, also dangling from hooks. Some other ones lay down on tables made out of tile, just as a whole mass together, as if they waited, resigned, to be hung by butchers.
I notice the expression of the last faces they had. The tongues out of their mouth, gone eyes, maybe in another dimension.. and some other ones with a fixed look. I observe the agony in them, defeated by the torture they underwent in order to get stuck into that place. The last hope of fighting for their lives, frustrated for ever, remains in them.
On the other hand, I see the sellers, living one more day in their existences... a simply normal day, which is probably going to vanish for ever from their short-term memory. Being surrounded by corpses, by that vestige of pain and anguish, of the impotence of being born to be murdered and consumed, represents nothing but some money to take home. I see those dismal dying expressions of not-human beings, but beings in the end, made out of meat just like us. They aren't anything but a mass, a product. The unfortunate ones who are at the beginning of the food chain.
The central market is quite wide and has several areas, and these people are just occupying their workstations in one of them. Nevertheless, this area is special: the one in which death and suffering are portrayed in the most visceral form, where we can observe in front of our eyes the power of humanity over animals, where a pork's head is hung and exhibited as if it was a trophy, a morbid trophy.
Real pain can be witnessed not only in the portrayed gestures, also in the fact of appreciating the texture of this live flesh, the blood still falling from their bodies.
The red toned lights that surround the atmosphere seem to remind us the danger that means to be born an animal, as well as all the blood spilled in the slaughterhouse; and at the same time, they contrast the crudity and disregard assigned to the usual commercialization and exhibition of these dreary corpses.
I don't pretend to create some consciousness about the meat consumption with this text. My intention is, in fact, to represent the innate vulnerability that means being born an animal in a world ruled by humans.
These photos were taken between may-july 2015, in the Central Market of Lima, Peru.
