Matanza (slaughter)

Mountains in southern Spain, early morning, early hours of
January, from the firsts decades of the 21st century. Dry and cold all what is needed for the preservation of meat, .

Then the "slaughter" begins. The sacrifice of the pig for the big purpose of using it in different food preparations. Almost without a waste.

An ancient rite, a reality in most of the five continents, with the most diverse forms and the same objective: to eat meat rich in calories and minerals as a source of energy for the rest of the year.

The rural family is at the center of the event: children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, nephews, uncles, neighbors grandparents, maybe great-grandparents and alltogether with the animals of the farm. Death is not for free, it has a clear objective and it's survival, it could be said that death is part of the family cycle, (as the generator of life.

Death is never light. Specially violent death.
it is impossible to understand death you just live it. You can only accept it giving up the answers.
In the rural culture, that is, the culture of most of humanity until a little over a century (when urban life began to spread and determine the predominance of the bourgeois lifestyle) the cycle is infinite. It is infinite because it is always repeated. It is infinite because it is transmitted from generation to generation over the centuries. It is infinite because all the beings that participate in the sacrifice ritual are, in one way or another, actors or extras of the movie.

In my feeling the chickens remind me of dinosaurs. Turkeys, chickens, vultures and other similar birds, constitute a visual memory of species that date before the beginning of times.

In that "time before time", even without the "slaughter", death already marked the rhythm and progress of everything as the essence and cause of life.
Rural life is hard, the things that surround it are made with humble means, (but always available and cheap). There is no place for vanity. Everything is the essence.

Since the man became sedentary, he began to delimit his space and consequently, the space of nature that surrounded him.
In that nature. animals have become a part of his possessions.
If there is captivity, we have bars and chains, and thus the history of man begins to this day: Bars and chains, as physical and psychics objects.

Death, is only a stage of the great spectacle in the cosmic magma.