Carrying a baby pig on my back : Tatsumi Orimoto

For quite some time, I have done various performances together with animals, such as the cow, pig, chicken, donkey, alpaca, and owl. I like to have freer ideas to make art - there is no reason that animals cannot have art if humans can. In 2012, I visited a baby pig farm in Ibaraki, Japan, because I had a desperate urge to carry a lovely baby pig on my back. What the current exhibition presents is a record of my performance there: how I struggled with a raging baby pig - peeing and pooping all over my body - until I finally succeeded in literally piggybacking it. In April this year (2014), I invited 500 elderly women to a monastery in Evora, a UNESCO World Heritage city in Portugal. We had an extremely fun time, dancing and singing folk songs together, while enjoying pumpkin soup, fried rice with duck, local special cakes and red wines. It was such a "communication art" in the form of eating together, which I believe is the most important way of sharing time for human beings. The current exhibition features my latest work that revolves around this event, composed of an approximately 20-minute video that documents the gathering, related drawings, picture postcards and reference materials.