Pigeons/Vancouver Pigeon Park

2010

Residency at the invitation of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie as part of the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, Granville Island, Vancouver, Canada.
Short intervention. Several hundred folds of recovered newspaper, size varying from 25 to 30 cm.

Vancouver Canada, February 2010.
The city was preparing to host the Winter Olympic Games.
The downtown was subject to major development and civil construction. The Downtown Eastside neighbourhood underwent repeated attempts of improvement by the authorities.

One park in particular was subjected to intensive revitalization: Pigeon Park. A hub for selling drugs, this is the smallest yet no doubt the busiest park in the city. The new park reopened in November 2009, in time for the Olympics.

Targeted actions by the police forced the regulars to move to other places and parks in the city. This human migration displaced an entire population along with its issues. Mobile, the neighbourhood addicts relocated. New “Pigeon Parks” inevitably sprung up as temporary zones appropriating urban space.

Through the diaspora of Pigeon Park, the addicts became urban pigeons. This embarrassing and hounded bird represents the reality of the Downtown Eastside residents very well.

For this creative residency project, I made several dozen life-size pigeons of folded paper, using recycled newsprint of a Vancouver weekly. The printed text and ink-stained paper reflects the typical plumage of the pigeon. The choice of newsprint, waste with very little value, illustrates the perception of the authorities towards this disenfranchised population.

The pigeon origami were placed in various vacant lots in the city. The temporary landings of these birds express a recurrent reality in the city, which the Olympic flame could not camouflage.
Learn more about Vancouver Pigeon Park