Not a day goes by where we don’t hear, see or even feel oppression and domination. As a woman, I and probably every single other woman in our society, to a greater or lesser extent, know what oppression feels like. I can only begin to imagine what it must be like for the even more oppressed among us, the unfairness of it all that someone, simply and solely based on differences such as skin colour, sexual orientation, amount of money, disability or religion, is regarded and treated as being of lesser value.
As all oppression is connected, we must deploy an intersectional approach in our fight for Liberation including in particular the liberation of nonhuman animals. Indeed, their oppression, exploitation and objectification goes way beyond imagination, yet has been normalised, legalised and accepted in our society and everyday lives.
Merely based on their differentness, we routinely justify and ignore the cruelty towards nonhuman animals by breeding them into existence, encaging them, exploiting and abusing them in every possible way and killing them by the trillions every year. How can we justify any of this for a few minutes of palatal pleasure, clothing, entertainment — knowing very well that in our capacity to feel joy, fear, pleasure and pain, we are all the same? And the most absurd part: there is absolutely no need for humans to consume or use any animal product at all.
Driven by the eternal search for profit, these abominable exploitation industries flourish as they continue to deceive the consumer, having entirely lost track of any moral baseline with regard to the nonhuman individuals involved. They are responsible for making people sick, causing cardiovascular disease, multiple cancers, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and far more importantly, they jeopardise all life on our planet, causing mass extinction, climate change, environmental destruction, microbial resistance and pandemics.
Up to what point are we going to continue to turn a blind eye and abuse our fellow nonhuman earthlings in the name of profit, greed and convenience?
Let’s end all oppression, since no one is free until we all are free.
Hilde Kentane
The installation, “Until We All Are Free”, is part of the group exhibition “30 JAHRE GALERIE; 3 KÜNSTLERINNEN” at Gallery Daeppen in Basel, 2021.
6 March – 10 April 2021
Location: Gallery Daeppen, Müllheimerstrasse 144, 4057 Basel, Switzerland.