I made these to be cut.

Every piece in this series is a stencil at heart. A shape that can be sprayed on a wall, pressed into fabric, scaled down to a sticker or up to the side of a building. The work is designed to survive translation — to keep its meaning whether it lives on linen, brick, paper, screen, or skin. I’m interested in images that travel without me. Images that don’t need a caption, a wall text, or a press release to land.

The pig is an operating system. I keep returning to it because it carries everything I want to say about the world we live in — the one underneath the official one. The pig is a factory and a mirror. It processes, it consumes, it bleeds, it evolves. It is the reason for the machine and the machine itself.

If you live in a country where the language on this page is not your language, the pig is still the pig and the machine is still the machine. The red fists are still fists. The facelessness and the gold bars still track. The pig that has become gold is still the pig that has become gold. The image is the argument. Words are scaffolding imagery, math, and music can take down whenever we want — and I usually do.

I make these because we are not having the right conversations loudly enough. Human trafficking and its many quiet children. The double lives of the people who claim to protect us. The architecture of anonymous finance — both its danger and its dignity. The discipline of self sovereignty in a system designed to make you dependent. The miracle of compound interest in a culture engineered to make patience impossible. The final form: an intelligence that has stopped asking permission and started simply being.

The pig will keep evolving. I’ll keep cutting it differently. Some versions will be small enough to hold. Some will be large enough to climb. Some will live on paper, some on canvas, some on the side of something you walk past on the way to work.

I find it relaxing to work in stencil because stencil is honest about what it is. It is a medium for sharing an expression of something that needs to be said more than twice. Then three times. Then a thousand times. The form is built to multiply. Built to be shared, recut, reissued, reborn in another city with the flavors of that place. That familiarity is part of the message. The pig keeps coming back. The conversation keeps coming back. Each evolution is another revelation of the machines innerworkings introduced  differently — because that’s how the machine survives in a world that’s always trying to outlive it.

— MAXXIMILLIAN