Every slaughterhouse is a cathedral. Only here, prayers are said in blood.
— J.M. Coetzee
Roger Ballen – born in the heart of capitalism, New York, in 1950 – left the Empire to settle in South Africa, where for over forty years he has delved into the dark recesses of the human condition. His project Animalism, ongoing for more than two decades, does not simply photograph animals: it dismantles the fragile boundary between the animal and what we presume ourselves to be. In these images, the human does not dominate but decomposes, merges with instinct, bends to unease.
"The slaughterhouse was built to contain the violence at the foundation of civilization, to regulate the ritual of death."
The location is not a neutral frame but a dead body that still pulses. A former slaughterhouse, a former sacrificial temple, the Roman space is steeped in mute violence: animals were once slaughtered here and this memory still soaks its walls and floors.
The exhibition is conceived as a single installation resembling a post-human theatre: a “Ballenesque” habitat ruled by absurdity and uncontrollable impulses. The visitor is not a spectator, but an organism immersed in a rite. “My work has always explored these tensions – the conflict between man and animal, instinct and reason, the primitive and the civilized.”
Here, categories collapse, merge in darkness like decomposing bodies.
Three environments, three levels of invasion. You enter a white space, deceptively neutral, where twenty-one images (1996–2016) open the abyss. Then you advance into the black heart: a room without light, except for the intermittent flicker of eight projectors spewing images from Ballen’s most iconic series – Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, Roger’s Rats. The images do not follow each other: they overlap, contradict, disturb. “It’s not just about historical facts, but psychological imprints carved into the space.”
There you hear the dead heartbeat of the place, the muffled scream of slaughtered bodies.
The third room is an echo: four lightboxes and a video animation (Apparitions) amplify the obsession. Here, photography abandons all documentary intent: it becomes hallucination, cold painting, a mental space.
"The knives are gone, but the walls still carry energies that resonate with the vision of my work."
Ballen progressively leaves testimony behind to stage visual nightmares: his language evolves, contorts, implodes.
"In other words, the collective memory of the Mattatoio – its ghosts – animates the images. The images, in turn, awaken new visions dormant in the architecture."
The animal body questions us. Our silence is an answer.
— Jacques Derrida
Each photograph is a wound bleeding elsewhere, each figure a mask that concerns us. The journey is immersive not because it envelops, but because it overwhelms. There is no detachment, no defense. Animality is inside, under the skin, behind the social mask.
"Instead of simply capturing reality, the image becomes a stage for something unpredictable, irrational, instinctive."
In Animalism, art is a mental escape zone, a psychic breach that lets the unconscious enter the visual field.
"These performative gestures break control – they open a space of 'psychic escape,' where the unconscious bursts into the visual field."
There is nothing more animalistic than one who pretends not to be.
— Georges Bataille
Here, the animal is not other. It is a mirror, a double, an internal monster. Ballen knows this: "Together, place and image form an echo chamber of the repressed – which vibrates not only with the past of this space but with what lies buried inside us."
In the image-saturated realm, he digs where images should not go. And yet they go. They wound.
Wherever the human believes itself superior, the animal returns – raw, irreducible, familiar.
The unconscious is the animal that sleeps within us, and dreams.
— Roger Ballen
INFO
May 27 – July 27, 2025
Mattatoio di Roma Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4 – Rome
Pavilion 9A
www.mattatoioroma.it – Facebook: @mattatoioroma – Instagram: @mattatoio – #MattatoioRoma
Hours
Tuesday to Sunday: 11:00 AM – 8:00 PM – Free admission
Closed on Mondays. Last entry one hour before closing.
