A three-week performance in Trafalgar Square will put one animal-rights campaigner inside a farrowing crate for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to make intensive pig farming impossible for passers-by to ignore.
According to an internal volunteer briefing for Animal Rising, activist Michelle Farnham is due to begin the “Harrowing Farrowing Action” on 1 September, at the top of the National Gallery steps. The action is scheduled to run until at least 21 September, with volunteers talking to the public during roughly 10am to 6pm outreach shifts. Two trained support people are expected to remain with Michelle overnight.
The campaign is rooted in an animal-rights argument: whether farmed animals should be confined and killed for food at all. Farrowing crates are designed to restrict the movement of mother pigs around birth, while critics argue that confinement prevents sows from turning around, nesting and moving freely.
Animal Rising says it wants a transition to a sustainable, plant-based food system and describes itself as a nonviolent, people-powered organisation. Its campaigns have included disrupting horse racing, occupying farms, rescuing animals, investigating farms and slaughterhouses, and campaigning against factory farming. The group says its aim is to generate a national conversation about humanity’s relationship with animals and nature.
The Trafalgar Square action also invites comparison with performance artist Marina Abramović, whose work uses the body, endurance and prolonged public encounters to confront audiences. In “The Artist Is Present”, Abramović sat silently for hours a day as visitors took turns sitting opposite her, and earlier works pushed physical and psychological limits. The resemblance here is not that animal activism is necessarily art, but that both approaches make duration, discomfort and the presence of a human body part of the message.
There is also an unavoidable practical dimension to Michelle’s confinement. If she remains inside the crate around the clock, ordinary bodily functions cannot simply disappear. She will need to eat, drink, urinate and defecate while the public can see her in full public view throughout the campaign, making bodily realities part of the spectacle. The briefing does not spell out exactly how toilet arrangements will work, so those details remain unclear.
Animal Rising’s message is straightforward: the crate is intended to make an abstract debate about animal agriculture tangible. Whether viewers see it as powerful protest, performance art or an attention-grabbing stunt, the campaign is designed to leave them confronting the physical consequences of confinement.