EDGAR ALLAN BEEM, MARIANNE MUELLER PHOTOGRAPHS THE POETRY OF PIGEONS
in: PDN Photo District News, New York, March/April 2006

ALL THESE YEARS, I HAVE WATCHED THEM, YOU KNOW
JOHN MANDATO ON HIS PIGEONS
Excerpts from an interview by Marianne Müller, Brooklyn 1/25/2001. Edited by Martin Jaeggi
in: Marianne Müller, The Flock, Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, 2005

MARTIN JAEGGI: THE FLOCK
in: Marianne Müller, The Flock, Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, 2005

MARTIN JAEGGI: THE FLOCK
in: Steidl Publishers, New Books Spring/Summer 2004

URS STAHEL: ORDER & CHAOS
in: Order & Chaos, exhibition catalogue, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur,
Christoph Merian Publishers, Basle, 2003


EDGAR ALLAN BEEM, MARIANNE MUELLER PHOTOGRAPHS THE POETRY OF PIGEONS
in: PDN Photo District News, New York, March/April 2006

The Flock, Marianne Mueller’s ethereal photographic narrative of pigeon flying in Brooklyn, begins with a sequence of swooping birds shimmering like golden sparks in the dark sky above the city and ends a hundred pages later with a bleak panorama of the snowy street below. In between, 44 barely colored photographs and 40 grainy black and white prints evoke the richly textured rooftop world of pigeons and puddles, feathers and droppings, coops and cages, clouds and shadows. It is a purely visual narrative at once very specific and logical yet abstract and poetic.

While it is possible to read The Flock (Steidl, 2005, $40 softcover) as an allegory of order and chaos, freedom and captivity, spirit and substance, the one and the many, Marianne Mueller insists her photographs are “not symbols or metaphors, just a very simple analysis of the place.”

Born in Zurich in 1966, Marianne Mueller still resides in her native city where she studied photography at the School of Art and Design, graduating in 1992. As an art student she created an impressive series of self-portraits. Then between 1993 and 1998, she continued her use of photographs as autobiographical documents. A Part of My Life (Scalo, 1998) was a fictional diary of body images, personal possessions, and intimate landscapes.

Photographer Allen Frame, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, got to know Mueller and her work during a year she spent in New York. Frame calls Mueller “a conceptual photographer in documentarian clothing.”

“A few years ago Marianne Mueller captivated her European audience with an introspective, but at the same time, distanced, riff on the Clark/Goldin/Tillmans snapshot-style in her book, A Part of My Life,” explains Allen Frame. “Seven years later, she has done a 180 degree turn, both in style and content, now looking outward, not inward, in a lyrical, documentary style, and concerning herself with patterns in collective behavior rather than anxieties within an individual psyche… She's taken a classic documentary impulse and rendered it in a formal, minimalist, abstracted and repetitive presentation, both in book form and in exhibitions of the material.

”The Flock was the serendipitous result of a 1999-2000 year spent in Manhattan and Brooklyn on a studio grant from the City of Zurich arts council. After spending some time in Soho, Mueller moved across the bridge to Williamsburg where she found studio space in an old brewery building. Up on the roof, she met John Mandato, a retired World War II veteran who raised pigeons there.

“I enjoyed the situation of being part of his life in the roof,” says Mueller. “It was like a closed circle. The birds, the flock is a society in itself. He knows every individual in the flock. His pleasure is in looking at, caring for and feeding the birds. There was something very poetical about the way he lived on the roof.”

Rather than shoot a straight documentary about Mandato and his birds, Mueller says she “developed my own story about this place and let him tell his story in the interview.”

There is an interview with Johnny Mandato in the back of the book, but only photographs of the man are a pair of elbow-to-ankle shots that show him carrying pigeons. Otherwise, the book belongs to Brooklyn and the birds.

“I am not a documentary photographer,” Marianne Mueller says. “I like to have things fragmented and broken, but elegant. It’s not about a single image but the way I look at the world, combine things, and blend in a narrative.”

Mueller estimates she shot 50 to 70 rolls of film while living in Brooklyn in 2000 and on a return visit in 2001. She initially dummied up a book of 400 pages but edited The Flock down to 112 pages for publication, for the most part pairing images in two-page spreads.

Shooting primarily with a 35mm Leica, Mueller shot Fuji color film and Ilford black and white. To subvert the preciousness of the photograph as an art object, she had cheap prints made at a one-hour photo mart and then scanned them to make the final prints for publication and exhibition.

“The way I went is what interested me. The double pages definitely influenced my Standing Still/Traveling Slowly videos.”

Since completing the photographs for The Flock, Mueller has traveled extensively. Her Standing Still/Traveling Slowly video series consists of 10 split-screen videos of travels in 10 different countries – Azerbaijan, India, Jamaica, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Romania, Syria, Vietnam, and Zanzibar. The videos record 20 hours of moving slowly through the streets and countryside of these countries and were first projected at an arts festival organized by Attitudes-Espace d’Arts Contemporains in Geneva.

Mueller’s current project is creating a catalogue for Buenos Dais Santiago, an international art expo organized by Attitudes for the Muse de Arte Contemporaneous in Santiago, Chile.

As a conceptual photographer, Marianne Mueller clearly values images as information rather than as objects.

“I am not in favor of single images,” Mueller says. “If someone buys one, that’s okay. It becomes part of their own life. But, for myself, photography has started to become like a huge archive. I can find anything in it, selecting things, bringing images together to create tensions between images to make them more mysterious.”




ALL THESE YEARS, I HAVE WATCHED THEM, YOU KNOW
JOHN MANDATO ON HIS PIGEONS
Excerpts from an interview by Marianne Müller, Brooklyn 1/25/2001. Edited by Martin Jaeggi
in: Marianne Müller, The Flock, Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, 2005

Since when? When I started flying birds? Since I was about fourteen. No, not over here. Where I used to live years ago. I was fourteen years old and, ah, now I’m seventy-six. It’s about some about sixty-somewhat years, I guess.

There was this boy I went to school with. So I used to call for him to go to school, and he had pigeons in the yard. I used to watch them, and then I met some other kid, and he told me to come up to his roof. That’s how we started, you know. And then once the war came, I stopped flying for, you know, for two and a half years, and then, after the war, I came back and started again.

Well, I used to be what they call ... See, they used to call me a "chaser." One who takes care of the birds, you know, and who chases the birds and all that, while the owner worked. And then on the weekend, when the guy was home, he used to fly them, you know. I would be there, too. So, I never really owned them, but I used to do what I wanted, practically, and like I said, once the war came, that was it. Then the guy took care of them. And after the war the neighborhood went bad, and I came down this way to fly birds. That was it.

These are the only birds I ever owned, now after sixty-somewhat years. I really own them, but the only reason I own them is that my partner died, you know. About a couple a years ago. But otherwise I always used to be a chaser. I never had, you know ... I could never get a roof, because a lot of people don’t want pigeons, that’s the whole thing. So I met this guy here, and he asked me if I wanted to come up. And that was it, that’s how I started up here. I’m up here forty years. Yeah, long time.

See, at one time, there used to be a lot of birds around, and I used to like to be up here by myself, you know. You always tried to catch more than the other guy, you know, but we used to catch together. A lot of birds, years ago, there was lots of birds around. I used to like that, when he’d come up the next day and I’d say, "I caught five," "I caught seven," whatever. Forget about it now, there is nothing around hardly, and I ain’t nobody to talk to.

Once in a while these guys come up, you know. When they loose birds I sell them back. So, but otherwise, you know, it’s a ... it’s a little lonely up here. That’s why I’m always ... that’s why I always clean, either clean the coop or doing something. Once I used to come up from daybreak till sunset. No more. As I said, there used to be birds around here years ago. Now, slowed down.

All the people that lived here before moved away. A lot of them was old, you know, old and they died, you know. This type of guys used to fly differently, not like these guys. Different type of guys that fly. All those guys are old, they died off, and that was it. Those guys used to buy birds. They used to buy fifty, sixty birds. They’d go up on the roof, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes later, they'd throw them all out, birds all over the place. Nowadays, they, you know, well ... Nowadays, the birds cost more.

One time, when I first came out of the service, I used to buy young birds, six for a dollar. Now the cheapest bird you buy is three dollars a piece, you know, three dollars. Then it got up to five, ten, fifteen dollars and all that, it’s all according. Certain birds are a little rare, or whatever the hell it is, and it costs a lot of money. I would never buy them. All the birds I got I caught. I mean, except in the beginning, you know, we bought some birds. But there are birds up here for sixty years, sixty years up here.

When other guys’ birds come over, if you like the guy, you sell them back. If you don’t like the guy, you don’t sell them back to. You charge the guy two dollars a piece. Some guys ... Some guys, if you like them, you give them to them for a dollar, or you give them back for nothing, you know. Like from one guy I get a dollar, a dollar catch. This other guy is two dollars. One guy I know for years, I must know him for about forty years, almost, right, forty years. Like, I sell them back to him for a quarter a piece. That money you take ... You know, if you catch enough birds, it don’t cost you nothing for the hobby. You know, it’s a hobby, right. It don’t cost you nothing.

The fun of it is to try to catch other birds. That’s the fun of it, you know. The action, when the hawk comes, or when they ... When they go out, you know. They roll out, in other words, they keep going till ... Might be about four or five miles away, or what the heck. It is wherever they wind up, that you get hope they’d come back ... That’s what they call a "roll out,” to keep going. Something, something gets in to their heads. They get exited, or whatever the hell it is, and they just keep going. You know, when the hawk comes after them, they go with the wind, against the wind, everything all over the place. Yeah, sometimes, like when that hawk comes, you could loose the oldest bird on the roof. Yes, you might have had him for years, and the best part of it is the hawk came so many times, right? And he is ... ah ... You know, you didn’t loose him. But one particular day, I don’t know what the hell it is. Maybe the hawk gets close to him, I don’t know what the hell it is. You loose him, you see. You got the bird six years, five years. All of a sudden, he gets lost. You never know what’s in their minds. You try to figure it out. It’s like this guy here: One day, he’ll be up there, and the hawk comes, and he’s gone.

In summertime, they don’t like to fly too much, too hot, you know. When they come down, they are puffing, they got their mouth wide open. It’s like people, they can’t ... want too much in the summer.
In wintertime, they fly, you know, better. It’s cool. The only thing you worry about is the hawk in the winter. In summertime, he don’t come around that much, once in a ... once in a while.

In the summertime, a lot of times they’ll come down. They are thirsty for water. That’s how years ago I used to catch a lot. They used to come down. I used to watch them, right? And they start running for water, and I go over there, while he puts his head down, grab them, or I’d use the net. Yeah, sometimes they come for water in the summertime. Wintertime they usually, you know, come for the feed, they are hungry. That’s what keeps them warm ... when they are filled up.

Yeah, they like to take a lot of baths. One time, I thought it was just because ... See, my partner he says, "Oh, when it gets cloudy, or when it’s gonna rain," he says, "they’ll take a bath." But I put them out and with the sun and all, I see them taking baths. So, a lot of times it starts to cloud up, you know. It starts to get cloudy, but they take a lot of baths. The ones on the street, I don’t know what the hell they do, but they, they look healthier than these here. I don’t think they get as sick as these here. The ones on the street, you never see them sick like these. So, I don’t know.

See, they really don’t like to fly over water. Yeah, they don’t like to fly over water. Like especially these here, I say, these here, like I said before. They roll out, they keep going and going and going. Like one time, ours, mine, went out over the, what’s the name ... the Williamsburg Bridge over there, over the water. The guy told us they went over there to Manhattan. All those birds forget about them. They are lost, they won’t cross the water, you know, go on there. You know, they keep going ... Once they got over the water, that was it. They don’t like to cross water. But that day they went over there, because the hawk was after them. I guess, they have got to be trained to go over the water. These here are scared about it. I heard stories years ago. The birds just go out, and then it starts snowing, or something like that, and the whole bunch went in the water. They all went down. Yeah, they got killed. They kept flying, flying, and they went into the water, some guy told me, some old-timer.

They recognize certain landmarks and stuff like that. I forgot ... I read something in the paper about that, you know. They only really go up to a certain amount, then ... I guess ... whatever. Nobody, nobody knows, not even the scientists. They have been trying to figure it out for years. Nobody knows how they do it. Everybody has a theory, but nobody seems to know. Yeah ...

Some birds could fly for hours, but they don’t have no brains. Other birds, you know ... Like what I tell you before, like when the birds roll out, they go to a different neighborhood, right? They go all the way out. If they stay together, even the dumb ones ... If they got a half a brain, they stick with the birds, and they get back. But some break up out there, it’s like every man for himself, you know. They break up, the ones that don’t have the brains, that’s it. The first guy he sees, he goes down, you know. That’s the fun of it. You don’t know who has got brains and who has not got brains. I got birds here, I raised for tree, four years, right? They went apart one day, when the hawk scared them. I lost them, they got lost. And so many times, they did the same exact thing, and they came back. One day they just ... just get lost. I don’t know what the hell it is that goes on their heads. Something scares them, whatever it is. When I see that hawk, it’s like a tiger chasing me. So that’s the whole thing.

You keep them hungry, just in case they’d go off. You throw a little feed, and they’ll come down. After a while, they start getting used to it, and then the next day, the same thing. If they are smart, they go off, and they, you know, they’ll be gone. But they’ll stay. A lot of them will stay, especially if they are mated. So they’ll stay, and each day, you know, you put them out a little more. After a time, they start to get a little more, you know, to get used to the place, and they get to know the neighborhood, and that’s how it is. Then you catch birds, you know. If you like it, you keep it. You try to mate it off.

Now, you probably wanna know, if they mate up for life, like everybody else does, right? I think about 98% percent of them mate up for life, some of them break off. I had birds mated up for years, and all of a sudden, they broke off. I don’t know why, but they broke off. I got a ... In fact, I got a pair here, the hen got sick, and they broke off. Now I noticed they went back together, finally, after about three months, three or four months, so ...

What I was going to tell you before about the birds. Like ... they are like people. The coop has got nest-boxes in there. It’s like people living in an apartment house. They have got their own apartment. When somebody comes in your apartment, you throw them out, or you fight with them. Same thing with them. If another bird goes in their box, they fight like hell. Now, if the bird is ... If the pair is old ... Like people, old people don’t fight, you know. If they are old, they don’t fight, the other bird takes over.

That’s a little ... At times, it is a little hard to tell. Most of the time, you could tell, but then ... it’s a little ... Maybe some guys could tell, I don’t know. I figure I could tell. I got birds here, I thought it was hens. Next thing I know, it’s cooing around like hell. It’s a crazy cock. The young one I raised I’d swear is a hen. It’s a crazy cock. And sometimes you think it’s a cock, and it’s a hen. See, the hens are usually a little smaller than the cocks, but then you get big hens, too. I guess it’s like people. You get big girls too.

Then you get birds that are maidish, you know, like hens. They’re like ... these women, loose women, you know. They run around with everybody. I got one there, I don’t know how many ... You know, she takes who the hell she wants. She’s got a man, but she don’t stay with him. She goes with everybody. Annoys me.

Like people, like I said, like people. Same thing. People are married there for twenty years, then come home one day, the note is on the table "Adios.” To me, they are almost like people, they do about the same damn thing. Like I said about mating up for life, right? Most of them, you know, they’ll stay together for life, and some, few of them, they break up.

The funny part of it is ... See, you could break them off like ... See, you gonna mate a pair, you want to put that dammed cock over that hen, on somebody else. So you break them up and, ah, you know ... Say maybe raise some birds, but that pair will see each other, but they won’t bother each other, you know, once they broke off. You see what I mean?

A lot of times, I put them together because I want a certain kind of birds. Like if I put, say, two black ones together, by rights they are supposed to raise a black one. What happens ... these birds ... how to put them, like in other words ... Damned, you know, guys breed so much that, like a throwback ... You know what a throwback is? In other words, you got a black and white person, same thing. You could have a black kid and may be the next time you have a white kid. That white kid might marry somebody else, a white kid, and when they have kids, might be black. Same thing with them. That’s what happens with them. So, in other words, you know, they mingle their ... whatever they call this.

Yeah, well. See, he lost his maid, and then he started hanging out with me, you know, follow me and all that, right? Then he got mated, I finally got a maid, and he didn’t bother me. Now he’s got a maid. He, you know ... Sometimes he comes. Sometimes, well, if he is real hungry, he’ll come looking for me to feed him. If I go by the coop, he’ll comes running over. If I’m over here, he’ll come. Sometimes when he is flying, he starts to come down towards me. I think he want’s to drop on my head. But it’s always ... I guess like pets and stuff like that.

We used to have one, it was a hen. She was a maidish, very maidish hen, and this kid here that used to fly up here also, he used to fool around with her, and he used to coo around like a bird, you know. Like a pigeon, and she used to start strutting around, you know. Like to get mated, she strutted around, you know. She is a real ... What’s the name there? ... Well, whatever ... But he always had a pet, you know, he always had.

If you like to raise, raise birds ... I’m not that particularly crazy about that, but you know ... you raise them, like I says, they’ll have eggs. They take eighteen to twenty-one days to hatch. Some guys tell you a little different, I don’t know, but I always figured eighteen to twenty-one days. If they don’t hatch after a while, they get off, you know, they don’t bother.

Yeah, sometimes I watch them there. They fight like hell. Once in a while I get mad. They chase each other all over the roof. They fight like hell. But the best fathers ... I don’t wanna say it on a camera, but they, do you know? Sometimes the hen and a cock is ready, you know. They are messing around, messing and all this. They are kissing there and all that there, right? Then she lays down, you know. In the meantime, he is puttering around so much, that somebody else sneaks on. And that’s why you get all this. Sometimes this guy circles around, circles around ... The other guy comes running over, up, jumps on her, that’s it.

But then I tell you the truth, I don’t think they ... All these years I watched them, you know. Sixty years I’ve been watching, right? This cock ... I don’t think they know who the hen is or who the cock is. Because they coo after a cock, they’ll chase a cock all over the place. The same thing with the hens, you know. They chase the hens, so I don’t think those cocks know who the hell is who, to tell the truth. But I watch them for years, this is why I don’t think they know who the hell is who, unless they are fruitcakes.

It’s ... I tell you, you know. It’s nice to watch this. They fight, they try to mate up. I don’t know what the hell it is, they do their job. They’ll come down and start cooing around again. I said, "Jesus Christ!" ... Well, you know, they could do it all day long. I don’t know what the hell it is, they don’t stop. You know to come down like to ...

Yeah, sixty years, and I really don’t know that much about them. You never know. Same thing like when you are trying to catch a stray, you got to try to figure out what that stray wants.



MARTIN JAEGGI, THE FLOCK
in: Marianne Müller, The Flock, Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, 2005

Shot on a rooftop in Brooklyn, these photographs show a flock of pigeons, bred by an Italian-American in retirement, who continues the vanishing working-class tradition of pigeon-flying. We see the pigeons flying, running, breeding, fighting, eating, or just sitting there, moved by impulses sometimes easily readable as mere reflexes, sometimes hard to fathom.
        The Flock is not an attempt to understand and represent "the pigeon." Rather, it just observes the collective life of the flock—the individual pigeon appears as a mere specimen, inseparable from the herd—without any didactic documentary impulse. We delve into an animal society—a society without checks and balances, without any notions of freedom or justice, a disquietingly mindless play of drives and stimuli, in which life and death are mere facts, devoid of any metaphysical weight.
        Since these birds are genuinely urban, living in a symbiosis with a human being in a city—a condition in which the exact distinction between nature and civilization is hard to delineate—it is tempting to yield to our ever-alert allegorical impulse. The pigeon coop could be easily read as a fitting metonymy for the city surrounding it, New York's proverbial "asphalt jungle"— as a parable on the individual and the crowd, on the constraints of society and the desire for personal freedom, as variation on the profoundly modernist topos of city below versus sky above and its attendant glorification of yearning, well-established since Baudelaire's The Albatross. Less allegorically inclined, we could pursue another, more haunting avenue, in which the coop would not mirror the city, but rather the city would be but an extension of the coop, in which the same brute natural forces are at work (hunger, lust, herd instinct and so forth), merely glossed over by the veneer of civilization.
        Elegant as they are, the photographs invite all of these readings. After all, we prefer beautiful images to convey profound, preferably transcendent, meanings. But maybe it is most interesting to look at them as the result of patient observation without any didactical purpose. Freed up from the desire to "understand" these birds, the photographer starts to perceive them shapes and colors, elements from which she can fashion an image. And since her observation is not obliged to yield neither knowledge nor meaning, the birds retain their fundamental otherness, inaccessible to the human understanding. It is by not intending to make any statement about them that the photographer can convey their actual obstinately mute and opaque existence. The truth of the animal eludes human meaning.




MARTIN JAEGGI, THE FLOCK
in: Steidl Publishers, New Books Spring/Summer 2004

Somewhere on a rooftop in Brooklyn, an old man breeds pigeons, feeding and flying them. An unspectacular, seemingly banal scene that photographer Marianne Müller observed and photographed for months. The result of her observations and reflections is The Flock, a rich and dense record of life above the rooftops of Brooklyn, oscillating between documentary observation and metaphorical condensation.
Precise observations alternate with almost abstract compositions in which the birds' flight is transformed into mere brushstrokes on the clouds above New York. The book is reflection on city and nature, on one tiny place and the aesthetic universe it holds. It offers a view of modern nature beyond sentimentalities of any kind. The photographs of flying, fighting, hatching, eating, and running pigeons touch upon subjects like mass and power, freedom and captivity, heaven and hell, associatively adding up to a panoramic metaphor of the relation between the individual and the collective body.
The photographs are complemented by an interview with the Bird Man, providing yet another, radically different perspective on the birds and their lives.




URS STAHEL, ORDER & CHAOS
in: Order & Chaos, exhibition catalogue, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur,
Christoph Merian Publishers, Basle, 2003

Marianne Müller (born 1966, lives in Zurich) has taken photographs of pigeons in Brooklyn. Flocks of pigeons, one or several populations – swarming up, swooping down, swerving, taking off and landing. The multi-part work is called The Flock. The birds descend like a WW ll bombing squadron, attacking in formation, curving across the sky, getting together, opening up and dispersing, like a breathing cushion that is crumpled and suddenly pops back into shape, as though the cover had been cut and black feathers were scattered across the sky. We see pigeons landing on a flat roof, entangling themselves in a big jumble, a wild chaos. What was once a tight formation has now turned into a sheer mass of birds. Then there is a single animal, a portrait of a pigeon, almost majestic, followed by another one, whose backlit head is turned away. We see a pigeon coop covered with droppings, a pigeon’s egg, a man holding a pigeon in his hand. We follow their trails on the roof, across puddles and smears. Gradually the viewer realizes that the work’s pivot is a kind of middle-ground between street and sky, on a rooftop with a pigeon coop, and a man who takes care of them, somewhere in Brooklyn, New York. The geographical place, however, is not important as the work shows it just in passing. This documentary work aims at a more general view. The pigeons could be read as metonyms, the entire work as an allegory of social behavior, oscillating between the feeling of a great sweeping freedom up in the sky, remote from everything, and the terrestrial scraping for food, between vanity, formation and aggression, order and chaos. At the very last, between intelligible order and incomprehensible, seemingly chaotic order. Order and chaos are always a question of perspective, of closeness or distance.

Marianne Müller hat Tauben in Brooklyn fotografiert. Schwärme von Tauben, eine, mehrere Populationen, die hochschiessen, wegkurven, starten und landen. The Flock heisst die vielteilige Arbeit, der Schwarm. Dieser Vogelschwarm scheint wie die Stukas im 2. Weltkrieg herunter-zustechen, in Formation anzugreifen, zieht Schleifen am Himmel, schliesst sich zusammen, öffnet und verteilt sich wieder, wie ein atmendes Kissen, das sich zerknäult und plötzlich wieder öffnet, als sei die Hülle zerschnitten und die schwarzen Vogelfedern am Himmel verstreut worden. Wir sehen die Tauben auf einem Flachdach landen und sich ineinander verkeilen, in einem grossen Durcheinander, in wildem Chaos. Die Formation wird plötzlich schiere Menge, Masse von Vögeln. Dann ein Einzeltier, das Porträt einer Taube, fast ein wenig majestätisch, dann noch eines, abgewandt im Gegenlicht. Wir sehen von Kot verdreckte Taubenschläge, ein Taubenei, einen Mann, der eine Taube in der Hand hält, wir folgen Spuren auf dem Dach, Spuren der Nässe, Schlieren. Im Laufe der Zeit begreifen wir, dass der Angelpunkt der Arbeit ein Zwischenboden zwischen Strasse und Himmel ist, ein Hausdach, auf dem Taubenschläge stehen, ein Mann, der sich um sie kümmert, in Brooklyn, New York. Doch diese Verortung ist nicht zentral, das Werk selbst zeigt sie eher nebenbei. Stattdessen ist in dieser dokumentarischen Arbeit eine Verallgemeinerung angelegt: Die Tauben lassen sich als Stellver-treter, das gesamte vielteilige Werk als Allegorie lesen. Eine Allegorie des gesellschaftlichen Verhaltens, darin das Gefühl der grossen schwebenden Freiheit am Himmel, der Losgelöstheit, aber auch das erdige Gerangel um Futter, die Eitelkeit. Formation und Aggression, Ordnung und Chaos. Zumindest: Verständliche und unverständliche, chaotisch anmutende Ordnung. Denn Ordnung und Chaos sind immer auch eine Frage der Perspektive, der Nähe oder Distanz.