FOLLY
Exhibitions
Dove Tales

October 2023

In English, the species Columba livia goes by two names. When in white plumage, they are known as doves. Beloved by deities, religious iconographers and the United Nations, the dove is an international symbol of peace, progress, and harmony. Yet their darker brethren are known as pigeons, and so often seem to bring out the worst in people.

Woody Allen’s description of pigeons in Stardust Memories (1980) – “rats with wings”– typifies a human-pigeon relationship based on begrudging tolerance and occasional irritation. To the institutions managing the city, pigeons are a pest, with a knack of finding their way in through the smallest spaces to roost in transport infrastructure and construction sites. They are everywhere, and they shit everywhere. It follows, then, that few urban dwellers give a shit about pigeons. Few, but not all. Look hard enough, and you will keep seeing and hearing people caring for pigeons. The old couple who come with a bag of feed or bread crumbs at dawn every day, to the same corner of a park; the community groups providing a free, on-demand pigeon rescue service across London, arriving within half an hour, at any time of day; the wildlife rescue charities tending sick pigeons, alongside many more flamboyant birds, back to health; perhaps, the friend who came across a young pigeon with a broken wing, took it into their house and helped it recover. Pigeons frequently lose toes when they become entangled in nylon threads or hair, blown out from barbershops; in response, “de-stringers” scour the city, spending evenings and weekends extricating stricken pigeons from this form of human carelessness.

Dove Tales is an exhibition about what it might mean to care for Columba livia. In the spirit of the de-stringers, how might we begin to disentangle pigeons (and doves) from these contradictory relations of disdain and care? What do we care about when we care – or don’t care – about pigeons? And how might this matter to the world? In their influential definition, the feminist political scientists Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher describe care as:

“... a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

These activities include care for: the physical aspects of hands-on care, which might be represented by pigeon feeders or rescue groups; caring about, which describes an emotional investment in place, community, or concern, such as animal rights or climate change; and finally caring with, which describes how we collaborate with others in caring for our world, such as mobilising politically. If worlds are maintained by care, then it matters which worlds, and which subjects are deemed worthy of care, and it matters which “others” we care with. Our collective stories are critical to this: especially from positions of alienation or indifference. In the words of the renowned zoologist and theorist Donna Haraway, ‘it matters which stories make worlds, which worlds make stories.’ What might we hear, if we listen to the pigeon’s stories?

In contemporary Western society, caring for pigeons is a transgressive form of care, deemed unhealthy, irresponsible, or ecologically misguided. It is seen as valueless by conservation practices and technological conceptions of sustainability. Pigeon care follows an older, more fundamental motivation, detached from the modern conventions of economic utility or biodiversity management: a desire to care for the living things around us, in our everyday environments.

When the problems of our time are daunting, complex, and multi-scalar, could caring about pigeons be a transformational act, which re-connects us with the challenges of living collectively in a rapidly changing, shared world?

The exhibition was a collaborative project between Folly, Eliot Haworth, and Feral Partnerships. It was held at Lot Projects between the 5th and 15th October 2023.