Witnessing the Chaos from Above
Pigeon Pyre
Self-Conducted Performance
Maybachufer Canal, Berlin, June 2022
Lighter fluid dousing feathers. The soft blue-grey down of the bird becomes dark and silvery at the touch of the liquids, silvery and shiny in the afternoon sunlight.
The dark chiffon of my veil and my red curls hang down my back, tousled by the breeze. Through crimson stained lips, I usher words of welcome.
Flowers from Camille ornament the casket. Nene, perched on the awning underneath the bridge, sings a Georgian chant.
Geza and I had discovered the bird that morning. It had come in through the window, seeking refuge on our linoleum kitchen floor. Under our care, it died, in a box. It sat dead, its head burrowed into the corner of the box.
With solemn dignity, Geza and I began the funeral procession from our flat down to the trash bins in the back garden. Upon reaching the door we looked into each others eyes and realized we could not discard of the bird this way.
We imagined a funeral procession. The Viking style flaming burial on water was Geza’s idea, but I was the one who posed for the photos. It’s our oppositeness that makes me and Geza the perfect collaboration partners.
Lipstick smudges on our plastic champagne glasses of Röttknappchen. The afternoon warmth and fizziness settles into our stomachs. I recall how someone once told me that birds cannot drink fizzy beverages.
After Nene takes flash photos of me on her 200s digital snap shot camera, I place the little boat holding the deceased soul into the waters on the bank of the Maybachufer canal.
The flames take hold of the Wood Dove. More succesfully than we had anticipated, in fact. We nervously witness the scene, the orange flames floating on the dark waters reflecting the blue of the sky, drifting out of our reach and out of our control. A small audience gathers on the bridge.
Nenes singing voice of Georgian chants travels over the ripples of the murky canal water, lulling it gently downstream.
The flaming mass of petals, cardboard, linen, feathers bones and flesh drifts to the banks, as tends to happen with waterway debris. The decomposing mass joining the debris and muck that accumulates on the banks. We speculated what would happen if it came in contact with the brush lining the canal, during that unusally hot and dry time of early summer.
Geza follows the flaming mass down stream, the rest of us half-heartedly trailing behind. He insisted he must ensure the sparks wouldnt take hold on the bush.
Later, lying in bed, sun exposed and champagne drunk, I felt the rush of satisfaction posting the images on instagram and witnessing the influx of praise.
The world has been sending me pigeons, in different embodyments and forms. My friend Dakotah enlightens me on ornithomancy, the practice of witnessing omens from birds, used in many ancient cultures. Dakotah and I found a photograph of a dead pigeon on the sidewalk. I hung it in my room and a pigeon came flew into my window to die.
I am a foraging artist. I collect on roadsides, where the accelerated forward propulsion of the vehicles wipes the road clean, and the debris moves to the gutters.
I imagine the cars on the highway symbolizing the forward movement of humanity, progress being made towards our hyper-capitalist tech future. I treasure hunt for signs and symbols. The truth lies in the peripheries. It is in these debris that we will see the constellation we’ve created, influenced, agitated, and understand that our existence does not lie on a straight line moving forward, but a web of connection and inter-dependance.
I aim to retrieve pigeons from our urban and conscious periphery and transform our conception of them. We have been led to believe in the beauty of the dove, and the filth of the pigeon, only to discover upon closer inspection that they are the same creature.
The religion of value is so deeply ingrained in us that we believe in a capitalist engineered phenomenon of scarcity and preciousness. As we look to the pigeon, perhaps the plastic in their guts and the soot on their wings can be defined as beautiful and valuable, as they are definitions of their survival. Their survival off of our our debris can be a blueprint for us carry towards a new paradigm.
Burning this little life, paying homage, was a disruption, a resistance, a glitch. Through this funeral ritual, pigeons are freed from their static position in our urban ecological constellation as nuisance and trash, and are transformed into symbolic carriers of messages and truths. It is our intertwined past with the pigeon that brought it with us here into our current reality. They have grown and adapted with us. Most other animals species on this earth with not survive with us to the end of this century. But the pigeon has learned to live with us, off of us. And for this it deserves to be regarded as precious, a value ascribed to those who learn to survive in these capitalist ruins despite all all efforts to eradicate them.
