Some Pigeons are More Equal Than Others

Pigeon languages our cities. When a speckled grey pigeon is trapped by artists and spray-painted in a miniature car wash, and released as an ultramarine green pigeon streaking through a public space, what happens to the flying rat ? How do we really know we have seen what we think we have seen? How is our perception always trapped and released? ‘Some Pigeons Are More Equal than Others’ began as an artwork by Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charriere and is now a book which treats the on-going art work as a breeding ground for more wild zones of contact with poets, philosophers, historians, architects, and other species. It is a poetry and prose anthology featuring creative writing made in dialogue with individual painted pigeons; a theoretical and critical space designed by philosophers and historians of science redefining our relationship to the world and history in a non-human-centred way; an urban manifesto evolving ideas on the role of public domains and the encounter with contemporary art today. AUTHOR: Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charriere are visual artists. They both graduated from the University of the Arts Berlin as Meisterschuler under the professorship of Olafur Eliasson and currently work and live in Berlin. Eric Ellingsen is an architect, landscape architect, and philosopher. He opened Species of Spaces in 2009 as a platform for the artistic entanglement of spatial experimentation. He currently teaches at The Art Institute, Chicago. 78 illustrations