7. FARMING COWS AND WORMS

This piece presents a multimedia montage that explores multispecies relationships in three different farming contexts: human-worm relationships in Kyrgyz compost heaps, and human-cow (or bull) relationships on two divergent Swedish cattle farms, one family farm (cow-calf farm) and one industrial farm (bull-breeding farm). The video montage is made up of different mixed media, consisting of video and still images, drawings, sounds, and quotations from informants. The visual piece is accompanied by three kinds of written comments. The montage companion gives more details about the authors’ motivations for artistic work, and about the circumstances of their encounter and how they creatively worked together. In their experience, artistic work has helped them to sustain their curiosity for their object, but also to give place to contradictions (love and violence, for example); creativity contributed to open their senses to a multisensorial ethnography. Taken together, these elements allow the authors to explore multispecies socialities and let the non-human ‘speak for themselves’. The montage guide accompanies the readers by giving them a more detailed subtext. That part is necessary for making sense of what has been sensed or intuited during the first viewing of the montage. With the montage guide, the reader can come back to each moment, pause, reflect on it, and connect it to the research question. With this addition, the whole process makes sense and we can see how artistic methods make a difference. Lastly, the artnographic statement explains the context of the research and presents the main question: what is a ‘good’ relationship in human-animal relationships where animals are kept with human food in mind? It explains how the material of the montage was created and why their joint engagements with artful methods matter to the authors in addressing the question.