Dovecote
2023
Metal, 5 m x 2 m x 2 m
Public Space: MultipleXity

As early as 2013 I sketched out a few designs for pigeon shelters, which I called Pigeon Towers and Boxes. After a few years of caring for hundreds of community pigeons, found sick, injured, poisoned or orphaned, I came to understand the difficulties and needs of pigeons and sought solutions to improve their lives in urban environments. 

Too many times we have heard that they “must be stamped out”, they are “invasive”, “pests”, “worthless”, “filthy”, “beggars”, “transmit diseases”, “make a mess”, “destroy buildings”, “breed like rats”, “what are they doing in the city?”, “why don't they sleep in the park?”, “why don't they go to the woods?”

We humans have domesticated this bird and introduced it into almost all human settlements. Through coercion, rewards, genetic manipulation, we have deformed its natural and healthy behaviours. 

Our relationship with nature is one of domination and self-destruction. Our greatest desire is a chronic hunger for control. 

This work is a step towards something else. The pigeon loft is an aesthetic and ethical solution to maintaining a healthy population of pigeons in relatively small numbers. But more than that, it is the construction of a mental and physical architecture in an ecological and visionary paradigm of coexistence. 

It is also an important exercise in a necessary process of learning about our wider relationship with nature. We have taken over all other species' spaces of existence, often with extermination as our model of interaction. It is time to seek cohabitation with the communities of other species, who contribute to our existence by carrying out their own lives.

Bio
I was born in Sânnicolau Mare near Timișoara, where I spent my summers as a child. The rest of the year I lived in Timișoara. I grew up among animals and learned to take care of them from a young age. Once I attended the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timisoara (2008-2013), I started to intensively care for birds, which I kept finding on my way to university, especially pigeons, blackbirds, sparrows and corvidae. Over time I became a bird keeper. Due to the increasing number of birds with issues and unsuitable locations, I had to move several times in and around Timișoara. 

From the experience of frequent moves I came up with the idea of a park/sanctuary for the animals, with rich green spaces and artistic objects, scattered like sculptures in a public space, on which they are allowed to sit, even to nest.

In 2018, I moved near Calea Urseni, close to Timișoara,, where I experimented with this shelter concept on a very small scale. Here I lived and worked until 2022.

Since the summer of 2022, I have been living in what I can already call a sanctuary: the SEPALE Bird Sanctuary - the second shelter built from scratch, together with people close to me, which I now call home.