photography in all its forms

"Somehow it was hard to believe that once upon a time there really had been something like the dodo out there in the world." —Harri Kallio

Combo Nature Preserve #6, Mauritius, 2004, is from Harri Kallio's project The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. Based on extensive research, Kallio produced life-size reconstructions of the long-extinct dodo bird, as well as a photographic study of actual dodo remains. The project culminated in photographs of the reconstructed birds in their natural habitat of Mauritius Island. This image was published in the summer 2006 issue of Aperture magazine alongside a text by Carlo McCormick.

This strange giant pigeon was eradicated between 1662 and 1693 on Mauritius Island-the only place on earth where dodos existed. When the Dutch settled on the island in 1598, they encountered the dodo, a flightless bird made fearless by the fact that it had never had any natural predators. Over time the species that the Dutch brought with them (monkeys, dogs, pigs, etc.) robbed the dodos' nests, while the settlers destroyed the dodos' forest habitat. By 1693 the dodo was extinct.

Kallio based his research on available historical and anatomical data, with an emphasis on art historical sources. The project involved extensive sculpture processes and construction, photography, and digital-imaging tools. The resulting work is a visual interpretation of a meeting between the viewer and the dodos in their seventeenth-century natural habitat.

The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters is a dialogue between the mythical, art historical, and biological dodo. The dodo is well known all over the world, thanks to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865); it is also the most legendary extinct species. Although the dodo became extinct hundreds of years ago, it still lives on in the collective memory of the Western world.

"I was fascinated about the persistence of the dodo as a character appearing in so many different contexts," explains Kallio. "As an artist, seeing my dodo sculptures in the Mauritius Island landscape was a reward on its own."