Dress Your Pigeon

A workshop held in-person that utilises visual metaphor to spark reflection on personal human-pigeon relationships for people living in cities

INTRODUCTION          

Dress Your Pigeon is a hands-on storytelling workshop where participants are instructed to create their own newsworthy pigeon-themed article. They are given one paper pigeon, one news article template, a selection of pre-illustrated props, and materials to create their own props. Discussions surrounding the props and articles are encouraged between the participants. Chosen results from the first workshop were re-designed for social media (i.e. Instagram posts) as an additional response to the changing nature of how news is delivered to people living in urban environments.

PROMPTS FOR DISCUSSIONS         

• What are your current thoughts on the pigeons you see on the streets?
  
• Do you have any memorable stories of/interactions with pigeons?
• In an ideal future, what would the city look like?
• In an ideal city, what would the ideal pigeon look like? Would they be there?
• In an ideal city, what would human-wildlife interactions look like?
• Why have you chosen this story as newsworthy? What makes it ideal?
• Do you think this news is possible today? Why/Why not?
• Has your perspective on pigeons changed?

I was inspired by sociologist Colin Jerolmack’s analysis into how newspaper articles had reflected the public’s changing perceptions on pigeons. In his paper, ‘How Pigeons Became Rats‘, Jerolmack makes two interesting observations. The first observation he made was that pigeons were seen as the antithesis of cities, which is clean and orderly, by mingling with humans and ‘polluting’ public spaces unconfined. I wanted to look more into this idea and see if there had been any change in perception since Jerolmack’s analysis. I did this by continuing one of his research processes, and gathered all the pigeon-focused New York Times articles from 2007 to February 2021.

I then visualised which articles had positive, neutral or negative overtones on pigeons into a graph. What I had found was that the articles were increasingly becoming positive, and that there were also a couple of articles that challenged the idea of “rats with wings” by encouraging the reconsideration of pigeons as being part of the community. In the final activity, I wanted to spark conversations surrounding this idea by using prompts to have participants reflect on their relationships with pigeons, and to also reflect on what they valued as part of their city. Along with this, I wanted to see what topics and ideas these articles were about and plotted them onto a graph with the x-axis based on whether pigeons were seen as friends or foe, and the y-axis based on whether or not the pigeon’s livelihood were considered. These categories later became the inspiration for the illustrations I had made for the Dress Your Pigeon activity. 

The second point I had found of interest was that metaphors like “rats with wings” was a commonly powerful tool used by the media to communicate the complex experiences and perceptions in life. With this, my tutor Monica Monin had suggested to use the idea of a ‘Pigeon Dress-Up’ activity to utilise the tool of visual metaphor to assist people in communicating their perceptions on pigeons. 

With these two points in mind, the activity Dress Your Pigeon was created as an initial activity to spark conversation and reflections on people’s perceptions on pigeons.