The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters (2001–2004)

“The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters” is a sculptural reconstruction and photographic study of the long-extinct dodo bird. Exterminated by human intervention in the short span between 1662 and 1693, the dodo had lived exclusively on Mauritius Island, an isolated ecosystem in the Indian Ocean.

Although the dodo became extinct hundreds of years ago, it continues to live on in the collective memory of stories and mythology — most familiarly as an illustrated character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Yet despite having become an icon of natural history, there remains sparse representation of how these strange giant pigeons actually appeared when they walked the earth.

This work brings together original historical sources — paintings, drawings, and eyewitness accounts — and documentation of the dodo remains held in museum collections, to create a quasi-narrative account of the birds in their wild habitat. Extensively researched, faithfully reproduced life-sized sculptures are set loose in the actual locations where their forebears once lived, setting up an imaginary and provocative encounter between the viewer and the extinct animals.

The dodo was not a category. It was a specific other-than-human person with its own form, its own presence, and its own claim on the world. The work insists on that specificity. Its absence calls for a pause to acknowledge irreversible loss — the world is now less — not the mild regret reserved for a lost specimen.

A detective story unfolds alongside it: we follow the evidence of what remains and what stories the dodos left behind before they vanished from the earth. This is a story about being the last of your kind.

The result sits somewhere between natural history and a wonder tale: a creature returned to its island and made real again, standing quietly by the water. It is an invitation to look closely, to stay curious, and to believe — at least for a moment — in something marvelous.

The series was published as a monograph, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters, winner of the 2004 European Publishers Award for Photography, published simultaneously by Actes Sud (France), Dewi Lewis Publishing (UK), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain), Peliti Associati (Italy), and Apeiron (Greece). The work was exhibited at the International Center of Photography’s Ecotopia Triennial, New York (2006), and covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Aperture, among others. Prints from the series were previously sold through Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York, and are now available directly from the studio.