Chinatown Centre, Toronto Art Book Fair 2018 venue, is the gathering point of an important pigeon flock; pictured here are some of its members.
Flock was an audio installation of the local pigeon flock playing intermittently in Chinatown Centre to remind visitors of the ways we classify the everyday that surrounds us.
The leaflets with pigeon maps and contexts for the sound installation were placed in the Fair’s free brochures.
The front cover of the leaflet.
An example of facts used in leaflet: drug dealing, is one of the uses humans have made of pigeons’ excellent navigation skills.
Another leaflet fact: though a dying art form pigeon whistles (ko-ling) are aeolian flutes mounted on pigeon tails that can sometimes still be heard over the streets of Beijing.
Flock is an audio installation based on the movement and sound of Chinatown Centre’s most avid frequenters – the local pigeon flock. For the duration of the 2018 Toronto Art Book Fair, the recorded audio of their cooing and wings intermittently resonated throughout the venue. This intervention evoked the way humans extract and classify the reality around them in order purify and exclude what is deemed uncomfortable: considering certain animals pests, appropriating culture or gentrifying neighbourhoods are all results of this drive. The project aimed at thinking more holistically about the living and ideological ecosystems that make up our everyday.
The leaflet that accompanied the piece, mapped these local pigeons’ behaviours and included a number of surprising pigeon facts. It can be found here.