“The Dodo And Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters” is a sculptural reconstruction and a photographic study of the long extinct dodo bird. Exterminated by human intervention in the short span of time between 1662 and 1693, the dodo birds had existed in their lifetime exclusively on Mauritius Island, an isolated ecosystem in the Indian Ocean.  Although the dodo became extinct hundreds of years ago, they surprisingly continue to live on in the collective memory of stories and mythology, most well known amongst them as an illustrated character in Lewis Caroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (1865).

However, despite the fact that the dodo has transcended to become an icon of natural history, there is still a sparse representation of how these strange giant pigeons actually appeared when they walked the earth. This book brings together original historical sources (paintings, drawings and eyewitness accounts) and documentation of the dodo remains held by museum collections, to create a quasi-narrative account of the dodo birds in their wild, natural habitat. Extensively researched and faithfully reproduced life-sized sculptures of the dodos 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.

Human civilization refers to the past to both help understand the contemporary era and to consider the course of the future. Using the demise of the dodo birds as a case study, this work explores the concept and meaning of extinction, as humans have become the primary shapers of the biosphere and, arguably, guardians of the species within it. At the same time a detective story also unfolds, as we follow the evidence of what kind of remains and stories dodos left behind before they vanished from the earth — this is a story about being the last of your kind.

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 received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Aperture, among others. Prints from the series were sold through Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York before and now available directly from the studio.