Animal Farm

George Orwell

Marta Ibarrondo’s Animal Farm series channels Orwell’s allegory into a visceral confrontation with ideology and violence. First read at age fourteen, the novel’s dark humor and stark critique of authoritarianism left a lasting impression, one that only deepened upon rereading it decades later. Its enduring relevance compelled Ibarrondo to revisit the text through the language of material and metaphor.

Painted onto vintage French butcher paper, meat recipe books, and actual butcher knives, the book’s slogans, rendered in thick black and red paint, echo the visual codes of propaganda. The bold, menacing typography evokes both urgency and threat, collapsing the distance between political rhetoric and bodily harm. These charged surfaces, once mundane instruments of domestic life, become warnings, implicating the viewer in the machinery of control. Through this series, Ibarrondo renders Orwell’s fable not as a relic, but as a living critique etched in blood and ink.