Pigeon Project

Education Programme

Birmingham Young Offenders Service, St. Paul's community group, and youth groups will attend weekly meetings at the loft.   The participants will learn how to look after the pigeons by feeding, training, cleaning out lofts and entering races. We will visit the Kings Heath Flying Club where we will enter our pigeons in races and learn from professional pigeon flyers, and we will visit other lofts in the area, as well as more famous lofts such as the Royal Lofts.

We will also go with the pigeons to schools, young offenders institutions and community centers, in a van with grafics designed by the young people, to liberate the pigeons.   This will provide traning for the pigeons and take the pigeons into the young peoples environment.

We plan to will deliver a programme of   theoretical lessons at the centres.   Young people will learn about mans relationship with pigeons throughout history, about the science of pigeons, as well as the ligistics of keeping pigeons.

The young people will learn to care for something, something which will rely on them and will always return home, and have the opportunity to engage in a hobby and develop an interest.

The South birmingham Pigeon Federation will be able to pass their knowledge and ethusiasm for pigeon keeping onto the young people, and help engage people in the declining sport.

Post project, oraginations and groups will be encouraged to set up their own lofts, with the help of the artists and the pigeon fanciers they have come to know.

Each month there will be a talk or film screening at the lofts which will be open to the public, we expect they will be attended by an arts audience, the pigeon fancying community, and workshop participents.   Paul Carson, the secutary of Kings Heath Flying Club will come and give a talk about pigeon racing and the role of pigeons in his life.   The artists will give a talk about the project and their interest in pigeons and art.   There will be an evenings of film screenings of war films, and other pigoen related films such as Vallient, and Ghoest Dog.

We also intend to fit a small camera to a pigeon for its flight home. The footage will be screened at the talks and in the exhibition (see below). It is still unknown how pigeons make their way home, making this footage particularly intriguing.

There will also be an exhibition as part of the project .   Fifteen pigeons will carry artworks from various pre-determined points (peoples studios or homes) across the country back to the loft in Birmingham. The exhibition will be durational, starting as a blank space. The exhibition will open when the first pigeon has been clocked in with its artwork, which will be exhibited in the space, the exhibition will be complete when all the pigeons have returned and all the artwork exhibited.

Alex and Ian will invite artists or theorists whose work investigates ideas of ecology, the animal world, and communication to make a piece of work to be delivered by pigeon to the exhibition.   They intend to invite Marcus Coates , who has an interest in ornitology and the animal kingdom; Ivan and Heather Morison, whos work expores nature and the environment ; Michael Prime, who makes environmental recordings such as recording the birth, growth and death of fungus ; Oliver Sumner, an educationalist and curator interested in social and ecological investigation in art ; Christopher Woodward, the dircetor of the Museum of Garden History in London; Lindsay Seers, who is interested in non verbal ways of communicating; Jeremy Deller, Nils Norman, an artist-activist who campaigns for utopian urban environments;   Simon Starling, who explores the relationship between nature, technology, and economics.   Artwork from around the country - Wales, London, Portsmouth, Scotland - will be brought together in Birmingham.

We will also invite participants of the workshops and pigon fanciers from the Kings Heath Flying Club to send something by pigeon post for the exhibition,

There will be a publication which will document research and particular elements of the project. Contributions will be made by artists, [insertspace], workshop participants, and pigeon fanciers.