The Animal Factory

Art faber is an umbrella term for works of art – whether pictorial, literary, photographic, musical or cinematographic – whose main or secondary themes are work, business and the world of economics. The word faber is rooted in the foundations of the economy. It is the Latin word for “smith” and the etymological root of Romance language of “making” and “manufacturing”, as well as the essence of Homo faber. Homo faber or “man the maker” is the toolmaker, the manufacturer of machines and consumer products, the main protagonist of secondary industries, but also of the tertiary, service sector.

Homo faber is also a producer of life, especially in terms of cultivation and animal husbandry – the farmer, the breeder, the tamer, the transformer, adapting the natural world to our needs: harnessing animals’ strength for work, creating consumer products, such as milk and meat; and processing wool and hide for artisanal ends.

For several decades now, however, this manufacture of life forms has raised several ethical and moral questions about animal well-being, food strategies, sustainable development, ecology, short-and-long term disaster management, and intensive breeding and its impact on the environment and consumers.