Location:
Venice, Italy
Year:
2021
Photographer:
Riccardo De Vecchi
Team: Giovanni Bellotti, Alessandra Covini, Daniele Ceragno, Marie Saladin, Sze Wing Chan
Production: Luigi D'Oro Studio, Riccardo D'Uva, Allfer
Engineering: Ahmet Topbas
Supported by: Creative Industries Fund NL
For the 2021 Venice Biennale, How will we live together? theme was explored as an exercise in coexistence between a human and a bird. The project aims to spatialise the relation between species through an intermediary object, translating the actions of retreating, advancing, controlling, abandoning, transforming, destroying, domesticating, cultivating, feeding and playing into a political and corporeal dance.
The proposal takes the form of an installation where materials and forms become the physical grammar of the relation, developing the archetype of the cage from a space of confinement towards a mediative object. Through it, a gradient of relation between two bodies is expressed: while the cage expands from the tender to the coercive, the ironic to the dramatic, the metaphorical to the caloric, habits transform into habitats, and the actions embedded in “living together” become the ingredients for a project of transformation and exchange between individuals, played out in the aesthetic and sensorial realm, of which the “cage” is the physical vocabulary.
The Pigeon Tower is designed to host the numerous members of the Columbidae family, the first birds to have been domesticated. An echo of the Venetian bell towers, its metallic feathers protect its guests from weather and predators. Both shelter and object-creature, it stands five metres tall in the Giardino delle Vergini, overseeing its flock.
