Socially engaged art as agency operates in the space between imagination and action. It creates room to ask difficult, often avoided questions, and to collectively re-imagine systems that shape everyday life. Where the Field Meets the Butcher: A Mobile Abattoir for Westmeath? a community embedded, creative research project centred around the independent butcher shops. The residency examines how local food systems, animal welfare, land use, and rural economies intersect — and how the butchers, farmers and community suggest to re-configure them. 

The project is developed by Sophie Von Maltzan in consultation with 5 local butchers, who agreed to collaborate on this follow-on enquiry to her Creative Ireland financed research strand: “The Land that feeds us” 2023-2025. This proposal for 2026, began with the question of why so many small local butcher shops and abattoirs are vanishing? Could a mobile abattoir improve the situation? Make local slaughter and therewith local independent butcher shops more viable? Improve the communal awareness of the importance of eating locally produced food? Rather than proposing a solution, the project unfolds as a process of listening and exchange. Listening closely to independent butchers but also small-scale farmers and rural communities in Westmeath, Von Maltzan explores how the idea of a mobile abattoir is perceived, desired, resisted, or imagined by those most closely connected to the land and animals.

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.