Pigeons, Parakeets, Rats, Toads: A Residency at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris

Under the welcoming guidance of biologist Anne-Caroline Prévot and the Centre des sciences de la conservation, I'm developing project about the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle's "invisible" urban fauna. The loud parakeet from India, the protected toad from North Africa and the problematic rat from Norway all enjoying one of Paris' oldest parks.... More to come!

Coverage of my Shanghai Urban Fauna Walk (in Mandarin) in The Shanghai Daily's Weekend Edition

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/

Fauna, Flora and Geometrical Shapes in Benin

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

Taking Photographs in Museums (a published thesis)

In 2010 le Musée d'Orsay in Paris banned photography-taking by visitors. Targeted at visitors, French intellectuals seemed to be the most affected by this new regulation: what about the museum's mission? Didn't the collections belong to all of us? Was this to increase postcard revenues? Outraged academic blogs were uploaded, photographing mobs entered the Musée in protest and articles nervously written, but the ban is still in place and visitors continue to stretch their arms in front of Monets to photograph lily pads. Museum visits, like any 'special' event (see below the image of St Peter's Square during the Pope's election), have become fascinating instances to observe how living the experience is increasingly cohabiting with its own mediation. 

La Documentation française's recent publication Les visiteurs photographes au musée ponders about this evolution from a legal as well as anthropological and technological perspective. The "problem" isn't new. Wanting to reproduce special artifacts (like art works) is decades old (think cave-paintings and hunted animals, Roman sculptures and emperors, royal painters and kings, daguerreotypes and dead children), but till quite recently this was mostly reserved to elites and limited in production. Today, as cameras become smaller, better at capturing light in dim spaces and drastically cheaper, photography-making is a practice available to practically anyone above the age of four with a smartphone-owning parent. In the book, the editors Serge Chaumier, Ann Krebs and Mélanie Roustan brought together a multi-disciplinary bunch of researchers to think about questions like: what are the laws in place to restrict museum photographers? What are these regulations' foundations? What are the strategies museums engage in to encourage or use this growing practice? And obviously why are visitors taking photographs in the first place? 

Back in 2008 I wrote my Masters thesis about why people take photographs of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum (this has become a chapter in their book). The iphone was a few months old back then, and things have changed a whole lot since, but overall the roots of why we archive visually have not radically shifted. Through photographs we reassure ourselves that we wouldn't forget, we commodify objects or situations that may feel overwhelming, we curate ourselves for others, we gather evocative material to socialize with others, etc. What evolutions in technology have, in fact, done is affected the experience of the now, and hence the museum experience itself... What the book makes clear is that what is at stake here is finding a way to insure that the museum's mission is fulfilled with the museum's reality taken into account.

[In a similar vein I came across this video recently. It makes a good case for street fashion photography's arguable existential crisis: too many street photographers taking too many street photographs is killing the authenticity of the genre, and of the street, and of the fashion, and of the street fashion, and of all its players... argh, existential angst, where has authenticity gone?]

TAKE MY PICTURE from GARAGE Magazine on Vimeo.

Project: Accumulation

I'm presenting the work and paper Accumulation I collaborated on 

with Drop Legs (Lesley Braun) 

in NYC tomorrow at the Graduate Student Conference on "Critical Information" at the School of Visual Arts (SVA).

Published: OWT on Reprocess

Some of the images I found on Google Books were published in OWT's Manchester School of Art 13th Issue on the theme "Reprocess." According to the zine's topic they were printed over past OWT pages (in other words reprocessed): "Submissions from the OWT back catalogue form a background layer of pre-existing themes, ready to be manipulated and reprocessed by new work. This changes the context and makes new interpretations while initiating serendipitous collaborations. GF Smith Colourplan and six-colour Riso printing help add further variables. No two zines in the run of 150 are the same."

For a the rest of the zine's potential pages: http://owtcreative.com/reprocess.html

Bienvenue/Welcome

I collaborated with Ming Lin and Didi Ohri on the latest edition of their anthropoartistique interventions on Montreal's foodscape: the Bienvenue/Welcome placemats. Come join the launch of the set de table tonight at the Nouveau Palais on Bernard. There will be food presented on thoughtful stuff and beats by DJ CadenceWeapon.

... And in an perfect concidence of sorts the CCA is having its own montreal food event this same afternoon: "A taste for Montréal" goes on from 4 to 9 pm in collaboration with spacingmontreal and avenue 8, and people from the SAT's foodLab and Toqué.

Published on Social Networks and Memory

C Magazine's spring edition on Memory just came out, with my article on the 9.11 Memorial - "Reflecting Absence or When Social Networks Memorialize."

Exhibiting Pigeons: ''You can fool some of the pigeons some of the time, but not all of the pigeons all of the time.''

That's a quote from The New York Times of October 29th 1986.

And this image is the project I submitted for the The Occupy Wall Street week at the Art and Architecture Storefront gallery - that was presented in the exhibition that opened up friday.



Also turns out back in 1986 New York Pigeons were already fighting for a new world order of their own (a story noted by the New York Times, here).

Published: Dirt and Pigeons

I'm happy to say my passion for pigeons has finally seen its first material manifestation in this multi-faceted, pleasantly deep and particularly clean issue of On-Site dedicated to dirt.

Curatorial Project: Within Which All Things Exist and Move - Closing Party and Catalogue Launch

The catalogue is printed and Pop Montreal was very generous - we have beer reserves till spring.

Thanks to everyone who came to the show, the closing vernissage and/or helped with putting all the parts of the exhibit together - the art, catalogue, curating, hanging or party.  

It's been a great success and hopefully was material to challenge the spaces within which all things exist and move!