Alexey Buldakov

URBAN FAUNA ZOO

Temporary zoo in unconstructed building occupied by artists. It was inhabited with the most common animals of Moscow city. Pigeons, sparrows, crows and rats were presented on 500 sq meters. They were based in large aviaries, which didn’t restrain them from getting out. Installation included text and photo materials considering each of the species. Michel Serres La Parasite, The Great Cat Massacre by Nicolas Conta, materials from web forum of crow hunters.

Crows, sparrows, pigeons, rats, stray cats: all these animals lead a parasitic way of life and are in fact part of the urban machine. They have no home, just a territory.

Urban fauna is a phenomenon that constantly eludes apprehension. These species, the closest but also the most distant, fall out of the dominant perceptive models of the animal world, trapped halfway between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Their position is undefined and unstable. In fact, the parasitic urban fauna creates, by its existence itself, interference with the long-established hierarchy of live beings. It shifts the boundaries of animal and human, challenging the integrity of our world. The aim of the Urban Fauna Zoo show is to explore and problematize the social, cultural and ontological status of these animals and of their role in human history. It is an attempt to hear the noise of parasitic existence which produces a new order of the organic.
Dmitriy Potemkin

±∞

We’re all familiar from childhood with the alternate images of a single bird. The first is an image we’re used to encountering, culturally and symbolically, in art, mythology and world literature: the dove that brought Noah an olive branch, signaling the end of the Flood; the dove of the Gospels; the slender contours of Picasso’s Dove of Peace; the dove as a symbol of love; and so on ... But is there a city dweller anywhere who hasn’t given thanks that cows don’t fly? The second image is the pigeon — the profane bird that shits on our cultural and symbolic shrines, our war memorials and monuments to peace, on our heads and our coats, on pairs of lovers kissing in the shade of infrequent city trees — the freeloader that grows fat off of urban civilization. These two contradictory images converge in this work by Alex Buldakov, Anastasia Potemkina and Dmitry Potemkin, artists who have made a study of urban fauna and include it in their installations.

All but earthbound from overconsumption, waddling pigeons, like the human residents of a megalopolis, have become indirectly involved in a complex system of socioeconomic relations. They are simultaneously a curiosity and a menace. Nonchalantly shifting their weight from foot to foot at outdoor cafes, claiming their percentage of each dish, pigeons stimulate additional consumption. They additionally consume, then additionally shit, creating additional work for cleaners who stream into large urban centers, stimulating additional consumption, and so on ad in nitum...

In the artists’ installation we see how consumer society’s inexhaustible horn of plenty suddenly starts to emit pigeon droppings, tracing out the symbol of infinity. Such are the dove’s tidings in the twenty-first century.
Olga Zhitlina

THE NEW LEADERS OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The artists present a new project for the opening up of Russia’s northern territories and reclamation of the sites of former GULAG prison camps. This is a presentation of a project for an ‘eco-friendly’ data-centre, provoking a spontaneous self-organisation of biological life on an evolutionary scale. The artists propose the erection of a source of heat energy — a data-centre in the tundra, in a virtually lifeless space.

Here are the plants that straggle over torn-down buildings and abandoned construction sites. Everything that grows along hoardings, in dirty and noisy places. As we know, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Pieces of bricks, sand, construction waste and rust. Thorn apple, henbane, nettles, burdock, cocklebur, bitter winter cress, hemp, thistle, dandelion, colt’s foot, beggar-ticks and wormwood.

The Grain Pavillion mostly houses what we have found in different parts of Moscow along fences and hoardings, on the railway tracks and wastelands. A grain is a potential plant. You can also plant a grain intending to eat the harvest. Ours is not an edible harvest. It is to celebrate the city’s indigenous inhabitants of construction pits and wastelands, their peculiarities in different parts of Moscow and their integral role in urban aesthetics of our city.

PIGEONS AND CATS / ALEXEY BULDAKOV

BINDERS / ALEXEY BULDAKOV