Italian performance artist Alfredo Meschi uses his artistry to draw attention to animal rights.
Meschi, a vegan, has tattooed 40,000 Xs on his own body. The number is significant to him. The 40,000 represents how many animals are killed every day for foods for humans.
We live in a society that leads us to incessant moments of amnesia, the current that nourishes our awareness of injustice, compassion, empathy switches off. So I was looking for a way to withstand these socially induced amnesia, a way that every second of the day it brought me back to the urgency of the struggle. Every second. And every second there are no less than 40,000 non-human beings killed just to satisfy our palate.”
Meschi calls himself an “anti-specist artists” and said that he wanted to stop and keep a mark on his skin to commemorate that number.
The X has been chosen as a neutral and anonymous “check mark” a symbol that we use when we have finished doing something, to count a thing, to kill a ‘thing'”
To draw the tattoos took 11 hours, which Meschi documented as a performance. That’s how long it took to write 40,000 Xs on a canvas or on a wall. During that same period of time, 100 million animal souls “will disappear,” according to him.
