The FIELD collective, made up of António Pedro Faria, João Francisco Sousa, Nádia Santos, Miguel Teodoro and Tiago Ascensão (EAAD/Lab2PT), won the Diogo Seixas Lopes Creation Grant, with the project «Columba Livia sp. Domestica: Critical Agent for Decoding Spatial Policies», which proposes an undisciplinary look at the pigeon as a critical agent and metabolic interface for decoding spatial, sociocultural and geopolitical dynamics.

Throughout history, the relationship between humans and pigeons has oscillated between reverence and marginalization. From messengers to symbols of resistance, from sentinel species to urban pest, pigeons challenge rigid categorizations of domesticated and wild, useful and disposable, center and periphery. The project maps and activates transterritorial connections between rural peripheral areas and urban centers, rethinking the interaction between humans and Columbidae beyond conventional narratives of pest and control.

 

Born from concerns about the relationship between architecture, society, and territory, the FIELD collective brings together a multidisciplinary team with diverse and complementary backgrounds. They share experience in editorial work, curatorial practice, and research projects across the fields of architecture, scenography, art, and design.

For the collective, artistic research and territorial analysis are guided by the intention to operationalize architectural and spatial analysis tools, combining them with anti-extractivist practices and contested territories that confront projects and logics which overlook the temporal and interspecies complexity of cultural and environmental ecosystems.

 

 

© Stroboscopic photograph of a walking pigeon, showing its typical heading movement, taken from «The Optokinetic Basis of Head-Bobbing in the Pigeon,» de B. J. Frost, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 74, 1978