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Stephan Vee has been working on urban parasites for several years: dandelions, pigeons and mice, like those in the logo he designed for Thuin’s Cultural Centre, that can be found all over the entity. For Fluide, the artist has deployed a hundred or so woodpigeons (the biggest and the most common of the European pigeon species) on A.M.O. Tu dis “jeunes” in Thuin. Used for their memory and tenacity since antiquity, the pigeons present in our towns have now lost their aura and are considered a ‘pest’ because of the damage they cause and the disease they spread. While the pigeons placed by the artist don’t coo or excrete, the quantity of them, their perfect similarity and orientation of their bodies, all facing in the same direction, makes them threatening. The materials chosen by the artist (a highly resistant resin covered with aeronautical paint), the grey metallic colour and the size, which is abnormally large for pigeons, praise the cold and impersonal nature of big cities. Stephan Vee plays on this ‘urban poetry’ where the natural and artificial merge. He invites us to reflect upon the places where we live and question our constantly evolving urban environment.
