Xie xie everyone for coming out under Shanghai's grim weather for urban animal mapping and talking

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project: Walk, Workshop, Talk in Shanghai

My Dirt is Matter Out of Place project presented in Montreal's Articule gallery last year, is about to have Shanghai edition: The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is a walk, mapping workshop and artist-talk that focuses on mapping the sparrow, the pigeon and the dog of the Chinese megapolis to uncover some of the city's governing ideologies. The event hopes to be a platform to address Shanghai's everyday and current modernization as well as think about present and past urban policies and social paradigms. From Mao's Four Pest Campaign, to the destruction of Shikumen lanes and the 'modernizing' urban plan each animal has its place in this ideological urbanscape.

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is part of K11's public program "Mapping Shanghai," and will occur on April 13th 2014.

3:30pm we will meet at at K11's entrance dome to start the walk. The walk will be semi-guided and last one hour. Maps will be distributed but participants are invited to bring cameras and pencils to map their own animal landmarks.

5pm artist-talk and workshop will be given on B1 of K11. Drinks and sweets will be served!

More info here for Mandarin speakers here: http://www.douban.com/event/21273718/

Faune Urbaine: Talk

There is an interdisciplinary panel on urban fauna organized by Université Québec à Montréal, Coeur des Sciences and the French Consulate this Thursday November 21st at 6:30pm.

À Qui la Ville? brings together Luc-Alain Giraldeau, an ethnobiologist and dean of science at UQAM, Jacques Dancosse, a veterinarian at Montréal's biodôme, Josée Duplessis, a city politician, Anne-Caroline Prévot-Juilliard from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (she has worked on the municipal dovecotes in the city) and myself.

It will be an informal conversation on the relation between the various animals (including humans) of the city. What are their physiological needs? What ethical, sanitary and cultural questions does the co-habitation pose? What other environmental urban initiatives have been done around the world? Could any be applied to Montreal?

It should be really interesting!

Animal Estates in Port of Rotterdam Authority

The Port of Rotterdam Authority commissioned Fritz Haeg to produce some of his Animal Estates (most famously presented at the Whitney Museum Biennal in 2008). This short documentary about the port's fauna and flora accompanies the works.

The video is slow and grey and the Dutch sounds unenthusiastic, but this aesthetic emphasizes the industrial landscape's uneasy identity. Like Haeg's work, the short is a reflection about the relation animals and humans have with each other. At first some facts feel more humorous, such as the swans inhabiting the Port dangerously activating the container porter machinery or drunk thrushes in bushes, while others feel darker, like the decrease of Skylarks and their singing -- by 95% in the past decade in the Netherlands, -- or the arrival of fast reproducing rabbit colonies in the oil tanks' meadows (for more on the tragic rabbit-human relation check out myxomatosis)). But overall, all demonstrate how intertwined they are in the larger systems humans engineer.

In any case it seems like a great initiative!

ANIMAL ESTATES 9.0 van Fritz Haeg from DWARSBOOM STUDIO on Vimeo.

Birds Everywhere

Projekt No.1, 1969. Cover art by Hubert Hilscher (from Pattern and Shape)

Dirt is Matter Out of Place: Thanks all d'être venus!

To End 2012 Merrily with Pigeons

Zoo Architecture

Hornaday with Baby Bison at Smithsonian

"William Temple Hornaday, Chief Taxidermist of the United States National Museum from 1882, Curator of the Department of Living Animals, and the first Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, with a baby bison known as Sandy, probably on the grounds adjoining the Smithsonian Castle. This is probably the bison calf that Hornaday brought back from his 1886 summer field trip to Montana. The calf lived only a short time."

From The Smithsonian Archives

Winners of the Animal Architecture Awards

Bat Cloud is a project bringing awareness and public visibility to bats and their critical role in our ecosystem. Installed in Tifft Nature Preserve, a park-like wooded setting developed on a former landfill in the industrial zone of Buffalo New York, BAT CLOUD is a hanging canopy of vessels that is designed and constructed to support bat habitation. From afar, the piece appears like a shimmering cloud, hovering in the trees. Closer up, viewers from below would be able to see plants hanging from each vessel. At dusk, onlookers can catch sight of bats emerging from the habitation vessels.

For more: http://www.animalarchitecture.org/urban-animal-award-winners/

Pigeons, Doves, and Magic

Cul-de-sac de l'Évolution: Carcharodon Megalodon

Requins, peur, mort, myths et chasse:

"Ilha das Flores": A Tomato, Thumbs and Pigs for a Short Explanation of Capitalism

Isle of Flowers (or Ilha das Flores in Portuguese) is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado. Following a tomato from garden to dump, it delivers dry narration, witty editing and eclectic visuals for an unexpectingly cruel message.

Animals and Humans: What is Art, What is Beauty?

The topic and works of the Grand Palais' current exhibition seem worth a visit. Displayed slightly lower for the child in all of us, the exhibit goes over the European art scene's take on animals. In the words of the curator Emmanuelle Héran, it gathers all art depicting animals and touches upon a variety of ideas -- the cultural norms of beauty (why is a toad ugly and a horse honorable?), or the role human historical developments since the 16th c. had on our relationship to animals (for instance if during the colonial years the endless discovery of new species meant animals were symbols of bountiful imagination, today the predicament of their extinction is underlying all of their artistic portrayals). There's art, aesthetic theory, human and natural history to produce this:

Beauté animale : présentation de l'exposition by Rmn-Grand_Palais

And my favorite little creatures - birds - are represented by the iconic Dodo, whose myth is complexified here:

La véritable histoire du Dodo by Rmn-Grand_Palais

Living Art, Being Dreams and Eating Frogs: Gala and Salvador Host a Party

Meat

This is a literal (hence difficult) short documentary called Le Sang des Bêtes by Georges Franju about animal slaughter and meat production. Although filmed in the late 1940s in two slaughterhouses and meat markets near Paris, this should be footage to think how we (whether in France, Canada or Italy) today (or in the 1940s) consider animal-slaughter (whether that of a horse, calf or lamb) and the ethics/responsibilities and labour behind it. 

Do we inflict more 'pain' today than yesterday on the animals we eat (how can this be assessed)? Are we more alienated from the meat we eat? Where do the butchers killing these animals come from today? What are the contemporary methods used to kill these animals? What implications do these questions have on today's food production and consumption?

What's That Made Of?

Here is a fascinating designer from Holland called Christien Meindertsma. Her work focuses on cycles of production. To do so she follows materials from their origins to their consumable form. With her project pig 05049 she went to the source - the specific 05049 pig - and collected all the products resulting from him/her. The original question behind this project was if all the parts of the animal were used. The answer is yes. 05049's remains were used up entirely: finding their way into candy, paint, shine, glue, soap, breaks, tiramisu, beer, collagen and American bullets (among others). All these were photographed in a book.

She's also explored lambs and wool, flax and string, plants and paper.

It's inspiring!

Mapping Movement: The Black-throated Gray Warbler Migrates

Generated by Cornell University and public contributed observations, there are a whole lot of mesmerizing interactive maps capturing a whole lot of bird migration patterns, here: ebirds. 

Vacuuming The Cosmological Threats of Dirt: Simulated Pigeon Shit in Las Vegas

Las Vegas' strip is an accumulation of anything's simulacra displayed in such a way that it can fit in a perfect picture frame. Wonderfully consumable, a Barthesian wonderland and very stimulating for four days, Las Vegas' simulacra is never dirty - tacky but never dirty - and always honestly thought-out, so it becomes very exciting when dirt is included in the equation.

After taking a cab from a convention center filled with electronics to Paris where I had a drink in a plastic-Eiffel Tower, I walked through a Hector Guimard-themed Casino to wait for a car to take me to Venice. Behind twenty other humans waiting for motorized saviors at the Paris (there's an unsaid ban against walking in Vegas), I noticed fake pigeon dung covering the Victor Baltard-inspired marquee. This isn't anecdotal.

As mentioned before, like the rest of Vegas, nothing is here by happenstance, everything is the result of recent thought-out and human-powered decisions. The water like every carpet and every tree was selected and transported by a group of rational humans less than thirty years ago. It is the most honest, and arguably rational, materialization of a late 20th century cultural phantasma composed of all and any signs and simulations. So seeing man-made fake pigeon dung in Vegas is very very meaningful. Perhaps it represents the American stereotype of Paris which includes more pigeon dung than the one they have for Venice (where there is no fake pigeon shit). Or perhaps Paris' train stations are the only ones worth reproducing for a hotel in Vegas hence the inclusion of its pigeons... 

Whatever the possible reasoning this instance adds an exciting new dimension to my research on pigeons and dirt as "matter out of place": the fact is that the matter signifying the presence of dirt (the pigeons) on the Las Vegas Paris' marquee is 'clean' (it isn't actual shit, but paint) and so beyond matter or context, this sanitized representation of dirt authenticates simulacrum by vacuuming any of the cosmological threats implied by the actual things it signifies.

And this is what is so charming about Las Vegas.

Horses

Horses, Screen-printed on cotton by Saul Steinberg from 1949-52 from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum