For the 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale, Selebe Yoon is pleased to receive artist Younes Baba-Ali in residency to start his latest project LOFT around pigeon racing, in close collaboration with Oumar Johnson, president of the young Senegalese Columbophile Federation. 

Since their domestication, pigeons have been revered as symbols ofpeace and domesticity, while also being vilified as dirty andpathogenic. Nevertheless, they are best known as messengers, bredover the years to have an unparalleled ability to find their way home.As subtle intruders from the natural world into the otherwise deeplyurban landscape, they serve as curious reminders of a worldelsewhere. Rickety assemblages of plywood and chicken wire nowadorn rooftops amidst metropoles like Dakar and New York,contrasting cities riddled with hopes for tomorrow with usefulmemories of the past. Today, urbanites are rarely confronted dramatically with the fact that thousands of pigeons are owned by adwindling fraternity of their neighbors. Though keeping pigeons wasonce commonplace in the West — it was cinematic shorthand for“working-class loner,” from miners to dockworkers — the hobby isnow reviving in new territories around the world.

Whether a messenger of love or a military spy, the carrier pigeon hasaccompanied mankind throughout its history, from peace and war to pastime and colonization, as both a pagan and religious symbol. Itssurprising ability to return to its loft, despite external conditions anddistances, has made it useful from a strategic point of view in armedconflicts, where its role has changed the course of certain battles. InEurope pigeon racing is now often considered an unattractive pastimefor retired people - peaceful and reluctant men obsessed with themysteries of pigeon navigation. But today, the sport is booming in newhorizons, from Senegal, Iran and India to New York, where a younggeneration has started breeding carrier pigeons, hoping one day tocompete with the best champions in Belgium, Germany, or northern France while at others using them as a means of communicationamidst revolution, as an economic means in rivalry with packagedrones or even as a simple pastime.

With this project, Baba-Ali’s inserts himself into the expanding world ofpigeon racing by retracing its history and network across the globeand the hopes, messages and dreams it carries with it not by turningpigeons into racing champions, but to sound and kinetic performers.Flying around with feints and dodges in staccato, like dolphins playingon the surface of the sea, the birds - by collaborating closely withpigeon keepers around the globe - will be taught to create clouds ofsound, carry poetry and art into new contexts or become performersin site-specific art words. Mimicking the migratory flows of goods andpeople, this project will paint a poignant portrait of a generation inperpetual search of a distant future. As birds move freely through theair, they remind us of the inability of some communities to do thesame. Thus, the performance of the pigeons resonates with thesignificance of the territory, the migration and the landscape we inhabitalongside them.

The project aims to associate artistic, historic and local actors such asOumar Johnson, president of the young Senegalese ColumbophileFederation, with the aim of establishing a new pigeon loft that is bothartistic and participatory in various contexts such as Belgium, Senegaland the USA. Thus, the loft will become a place where the artisticscenes cross with the future of pigeon racing and local inhabitants.