The Pigeon Correspondence Bureau is for messages that refuse to travel by ordinary means. Experiences as a hotline and installation in the Kepmer museum. Visitors are invited to pick up the phone in the installation space, at the Museum, or on their own device to receive communications routed through the phone and a network of working pigeons. Part archive, portal for hope, and part listening space, the Bureau treats every note, call, and story as a fragile document worth carrying carefully from one body to another.
This long-term, site-specific artwork consists of a fully operational payphone installed at the Kemper, a coordinated pigeon release conducted during the exhibition summer 2026.
The project begins with the fundamental concept of Desiderata, a poem that advocates empathy and care amidst uncertainty. The work aims to embody the poem and disseminate its message through practice by reciting it to a flock of homing pigeons and allowing their flight to serve as a response to the poem.
This approach redefines communication as an interspecies exchange fundamentally motivated by attention rather than certainty. Collaboration is conceptualized as a form of poetics, emphasizing trust that meaning can transcend languages, lands, and skies. The objective is to allow intention to flow freely, and to experience the poem through senses beyond human language. In this manner, meaning-making becomes a reciprocal process, grounded in our choice to engage critically with the living systems surrounding us. The payphone acts as the conduit between these two.
