Three Conversations Bird Closet is distinguished by its playful, prankish nature. Members of the collective have each assumed a bird alter ego and fashioned an accompanying mask. By conjuring an alternate universe steeped in a rich self-mythology, Bird Closet creates a parallel space in which the artists are free to pursue creative and social projects that may seem otherwise untenable in the world as it exists. Far from escapist, the works of Bird Closet are meant to intervene on material reality and inspire similar explorations by other residents of the area and beyond. Bird Closet’s public interventions have included a series of three billboards installed at the entrance to the village of Bethel on a major state highway, and the zine Fraxinus, issues of which have been covertly disseminated in public areas around the village. At the heart of Bird Closet’s public interventions are collages, which reconfigure language and imagery extracted from relevant literature and the publicly available archives of the Bethel Historical Society and Museum. By reappropriating fragments of Bethel’s history, Bird Closet invents a brand-new idiom through which to voice new forms of community and new modes of social imagination. As Bird Closet continues to evolve, one constant has been the use of Snapchat group chats as a strategy for organizing and communicating. Bird Closet’s group chats ensure an ongoing conversation in which members can share their daily lived experience, support one another, voice their frustrations and concerns, discuss difficult topics, and continue imagining new possible futures for the collective, their community, and the world at large. The following are excerpts from three recent conversations in a Bird Closet group chat.
(opposite 124–125) Francesca Fiore and Hillary Wagner SOIL SERIES: A Social Drawing 2018
Bird Closet (SOIL SERIES: A Social Drawing)
In Bird Closet, teens who have played integral roles in the evolution of SOIL SERIES become artists in their own right, working in horizontal collaboration with one another and with SOIL SERIES’s founding artists to create works that excavate Bethel’s past and use this history as material for the creation of a new future.
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