FLESH TV IS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PLATFORM FOCUSED ON RESTORING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH LIFE ON EARTH. WE AIM TO EXPLORE ALTERNATIVE PARADIGMS AND FORMS OF ACTIVISM USING ART, RESEARCH AND CRITICAL THINKING.

Flesh TV was born out of reflections around the concepts of humanity and animality and the philosophical, ethical, political, economical, socio-cultural stakes that resulted from the separation between Human and Animal. The study of our origin and development as humans -anthropogenesis- coupled to disciplines like biology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy (to name a few) shaped through commonly accepted delimitations the way we interact with other species as well as with our environment.

The overexploitation of animals and nature and its consequences (species extinction, loss of natural habitat, natural resources depletion, pollution, waste, climate change, zoonoses,...) must make us ask ourselves whether the separation between Human and Animal is a starting point to question our relationship to others and the world?

The 'political animal' we're supposed to be, a social creature with the power of moral reasoning, worked actively towards its mastery over nature rather than embracing its role within the circle of living things, co-existing and relying on one another. Human activity has reduced the biomass of terrestrial mammals and wild marine by six and the biomass of plant matter by half. Today, humans and intensive farming livestock account for 96% of Mammal Biomass: humans representing 36%, domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs accounting for 60%, and wild mammals a mere 4%¹. This observation brings us to the fact that 60% of the mammal biomass is made of life that is bred solely to be killed and consumed.

Flesh TV intends to bring together artists, thinkers, writers, activists, organizations from all around the world who are interested in addressing these topics. It also aims at highlighting earth + animal rights collectives and activists, bringing exposure and support to their work and actions. Its main mission is to channel the power behind a growing community of creators and actors willing to challenge anthropocentrism and to engage in a cultural transformation of our societies. This change requires a profound reconfiguration of our thinking and sensitivity to abandon our inorganic ways (exploitive, mechanistic, destructive) and shift to a holistic vision of our systems. This platform aspires to be a space for reflection, creation and action, where like-minded people are allowed to blend their practices with their convictions, connect, collaborate, inspire and get inspired.

When did human animals dissociate themselves from non-human animals and reduced other lives to objects for the use of their own species? When did humanity and nature became two separate things? Is this separation the root that justifes the structural violence we use against other species and our environment? Since the onset of the agricultural, scientific and industrial revolutions, has mankind lost its relation to nature or to its own human nature – as part of an ecosystem?

With agriculture, we began to domesticate the whole world. Domestication imposes a hierarchy onto the interspecies relationship, as man becomes lord and master of animals. Understandably, this relationship is then projected onto the whole of nature, which becomes in its entirety the object of domination and control. Agriculture inaugurated our conception of the earth as a resource or asset, defined primarily by its productivity. As we lost our relation to the land, we lost our relation to anything assumed to have an extrinsic, conditional value based on what it could produce.

While turning ecosystems and living beings into 'natural capital,' exploitation and extractivism became the principles of a nonreciprocal, unbalanced, dominance-based relationship with the earth and its inhabitants, one purely of taking without creating the conditions for regeneration and future life to prosper. The ultimate form of capitalism -neoliberalism- denies integrity and sentience to any being used for generating profit. Our economic model is at war with life on earth and is blind to the fact that cooperation is the primary engine of evolution. However, each of us has the ability, opportunity and power to decide and act in ways that can minimize our negative impact: our way of life stands as both the problem and the solution.

Flesh TV aspires to merge art, research and activism to encourage a political commitment on animal and nature-related topics within those realms. Whoever takes part in the platform and its various projects is engaged, one way or another, on a personal and/or public level, in the common vision, ideals and hopes underlying this initiative. It ranges from participants that simply choose a lifestyle that stands against animal exploitation and nature destruction, to those who use their platforms to raise awareness on these issues, to finally those who create entire projects to reinvent our relationship to what we stopped portraying as kin. As an art platform, sound label, research medium, as a transdisciplinary political space, we want to create, host, and nourish ideas, representations, attitudes and behaviors without which the transition to the future we're envisioning, and somehow incarnating through our choices and practices, cannot happen.

Ever since the rise of agrarian civilizations, cultures have justified their domination over those they conquered by claiming innate superiority. Human dominion over the natural world proceeds from a firm basis of religion, science, technology, philosophy, culture and other systems, disciplines and models implied in shaping our actions and habits, layers and assumptions, practices and mindsets. The limits of such a paradigm cannot be ignored when confronted with its disastrous consequences, whether we focus on the state of the planet or our treatment of animals. Is it still acceptable to maintain this position and justify being on top of everything? Is such a hierarchy relevant when we go as far as endangering our own species and habitat?

If we put aside the scientific and philosophical debate about consciousness as what differentiate humans from animals, it's worth mentioning that all the research on which human supremacy was built has never been confronted with an animal-oriented equivalent body of knowledge. Disciplines like ethology –the study of animal behavior– are quite recent (early-1900) and their applications are both versatile and ambiguous: they can be used in animal ethics to defend animal autonomy and dignity as well as to improve their conditions of detention and exploitation.

What we call Animal Science today is commonly described as "studying the biology of the animals that are under the control of humankind," a discipline that is concerned only with improving the business of producing domestic livestock species. Even the term 'animal welfare' suffers from an anthropocentric perspective as it relies on a utilitarian attitude towards the well-being of non-human animals: even if animals have some moral standing and should be treated respectfully or humanely, it is nevertheless tolerable for humans to use animals in various ways that harm them.

Can new paradigms emerge from re-thinking, re-designing the tension between human and non-human animals? Can new behaviors appear from re-adjusting how we belong in the world? Would they give birth to new relationships, based on sharing and cooperating rather than exploiting and pillaging?

Flesh TV wants to participate in a global effort to shape a new consciousness, one in which co-existence triumphs over domination, and humility before nature’s complexity. There's a forgotten fundamental chemistry in how we, as a species, are entangled in the multiple interdependencies of a sprawling ecosystem. Flesh TV focuses on how we treat non-humans and nature as a starting point to question our condition and relationship to the world, to refect on the experience of life and our so- called 'humanity,' and what that means, and what we want it to mean.

To put it in the most anthropocentric way:

When does one start becoming a human - or stop being one?

¹ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115