Jorge Gody’s ‘15 class project draws an audience outside Farinon

If one walked by Farinon Student Center Monday afternoon or evening, he or she might recall seeing a peculiar “petting zoo” in front.

Instead of live animals in the zoo, there were four cages with raw chicken and three cages with raw beef. It was placed on the quad by Jorge Godoy ‘15 for a project for his Land and Global Environment Art class.

The project had to do with the aspect of time and he wanted to work with something that rotted. He did not set up the zoo to change people’s moral views on animal cruelty or push for veganism. Rather, he decided to do a “petting zoo with the intention of…making the audience uncomfortable.”

“In a regular petting zoo, we are okay with touching and feeding the animal, but once it’s dead it’s another ball game that people don’t want to deal with,” Godoy said.

Throughout the day, Godoy revisited the “petting zoo” several times and saw many expected reactions of shock and confusion. At one point, he saw someone replace the raw chicken meat with chicken bones and told Godoy that he just assumed it was an interactive art piece.

“It seemed like an activist type piece [at first], but it was not meant to be seen as that,” Godoy said. “What [message] the audience gets out of it is up to them.