STAVANGER
SECESSION
2026

TO LIVE
AND THINK
LIKE PIGS

Stavanger Secession 2026 – To Live and Think Like Pigs takes the pig as its point of departure: the animal endowed with a refined sense of smell, but also the insult; the vilified mammal; the cyborg body genetically modified by globalized agro-industry; and the cartoon figure with synthetic pink skin. The pig is a world-being, carrying a truth not only about the obscuring power of modernity and its violence, but also about humanity’s capacity to inscribe its most unbearable traits onto the bodies of others: greed, gluttony, impurity, excess, and filth. This edition is inspired by mathematician and philosopher Gilles Châtelet’s eponymous book, in which he describes the cognitive livestock that the average Western citizen has become at the dawn of market democracies—satiated by comfort, abundance, and cathodic 24/7 entertainment. To live and think like pigs is to exist at the intersection of industrial automation, the mass management of bodies, anthropocentrism, and the process through which the other is rendered abject.