The Passengers is a multi-faceted art-based research, performance and photo project about the extinction of the passenger pigeon which searches for a different way of living together with ecological loss. The project took place in locations of significance to the disappearance of passenger pigeons, where pigeon characters look for signs of their former existence within material presence and collective human memory. It looks at the extinction of this species not as a singular loss but rather as a thick loss of broken entanglements that accumulated over time, and is positioned in this tear, making this loss as a missing presence in the world that can still be felt when we attune to its lingering traces.

It is simultaneously a study of the human impact on natural ecologies and of how we understand those impacts. The pilgrimage-like visits examine a key moment in western consciousness—when people became aware that their actions could lead to the extinction of a once abundant species—and is a performative way of thinking through what it means to exist with an awareness of the great loss we live with as humans in the twenty-first century. It is a search for a different way of living with ecological loss, which neither succumbs to dejection nor turns away from the trouble of it, instead making space for attending to what is gone. It is this attention that the project proposes as an experiment in enacting practices for shifting relationships to the unprecedented planetary change underway, how to see it, which is to say how to feel it in our relationship to the world we move through as present human bodies.

With grateful acknowledgement of critical project support from the Royal Ontario Museum, especially Mark Peck, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, especially Andrew Hunter; and a special thanks to Eva Hirmer, Barbara Hobot, Laura Knap, Marie-Camille Lalande, Talia Pennachetti, Tiana Prince and Alice Tien: the pigeons.

DodoLab gratefully acknowledges project funding from the Ontario Arts Council