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Short abstract

Artists are increasingly expected to collaborate in interdisciplinary or non-artistic settings. But how to collaborate well? Through the artistic research project The Great Misunderstanding, we explore what the pigeon can teach us about the messy ethics of artistic collaboration in practice.

Long abstract

Artists are increasingly expected to collaborate in interdisciplinary or non-artistic settings. But how to collaborate well? Through the artistic research project The Great Misunderstanding by artist Helena , we explore what the pigeon can teach us about the ethics of artistic collaboration in practice.

While pigeons are one of our oldest companion species, our relationship with these animals over the past 10.000 years has been ambiguous: we treated pigeons as symbols of peace, war heroes, hunted pests, and sacred messengers. In our current urban landscape, the pigeon roams our streets alongside us, living in and off our dirt, depending on our infrastructures.

In the artistic research project The Great Misunderstanding, artist Helena collaborated with pigeons to explore how a shared urban space comes into being. By taking a generous stance towards the pigeon, the pigeon transformed from an object of inquiry towards a co-researcher, showing the messy tensions involved in interspecies collaboration: from domination and domestication to care and generosity. Artistic collaboration emerges here as a collaborative give-and-take between humans and non-humans, based on a shared attitude of radical openness, moral playfulness and generosity, complicating existing norms and ideals of collaborating well as artist.