Pigeonisation or Who Gives a Flying Rat?
Pati Starzykowski is an artist and transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of art, ecology, and socio-spatial politics. Through sculpture, performance, site-responsive intervention, counter-mapping, and moving image, their work investigates marginalised ecologies, such as weeds, pigeons, and informal infrastructures, as sources of knowledge and political agency, questioning hierarchies of value in the production of space. Pati holds an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins, UAL (distinction), where their thesis 'Weeds before Meadow: A Case for Weed Assemblages as Queer Ecological Models for the World to Come' laid the foundation for their ongoing research into ruderal ecologies. They are currently a PhD candidate at Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design, UCA, and a participating research practitioner in the Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2026/27). Recent projects include The Trial of the Unwanted (Viborg Kunsthal, 2026), which mimics juridical procedure through sensory experience to interrogate the biopolitical category of weeds, and The Pigeon Pavilion: A Manifesto in Defence of Pigeonisation (Venice, 2025), a cross-species intervention honouring pigeons as urban cohabitants enacted during the British Council Fellowship with Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.
"Rats with wings," or "flying rats," is what New York City Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving called pigeons in 1966, and it stuck. But pigeons weren't always vermin. For centuries, cities kept dovecotes and pigeon towers, valuing pigeons for meat, eggs, guano, and companionship. In France as in England, keeping a dovecote was once a feudal privilege, so pigeon architecture has long been entangled with contested power, not only economics. The collapse of that metabolic relationship and the knowledge that sustained it was exacerbated with the invention of synthetic fertiliser. Once guano was no longer needed, the pigeon was recast as pest rather than partner. The labour of nutrient cycling (mostly unrecognised) which pigeons already do in cities sits inside what I call epistemic disharmony: governance manages pigeons through pest and nuisance regulation, and hygiene discourse clears a short-lived memory of what they once did, and still do, for urban and human life. Feeding pigeons has moved from ordinary care to criminal offence in several cities across Europe, with pigeons sterilised and culled en masse rather than learned from. In 2026, more than 600 pigeons were shot in organised culls at London train stations.
This proposal takes that disharmony as a given condition, and with certain urgency enters directly into repair because the vernaculars of caring for pigeons, and their origins, are worth a closer look today. By partnering with pigeon rescue groups, nurseries, vets, and ecologists to speculate and test new modes of cohabitation between humans, pigeons, and vegetal urban life, asking what a genuinely productive, non-extractive relationship could look like under real ecological, legal, and geopolitical pressure. This project grew from The Pigeon Pavilion: A Manifesto in Defense of Pigeonisation, a public intervention during my British Council Fellowship at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. It is now ready to expand through collaborative work.