Combo Nature Preserve #6, Mauritius, 2004

"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, from Harri Kallio's project The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters, was published in the summer 2006 issue of Aperture magazine alongside a text by Carlo McCormick. Researching the available historical and anatomical sources, Kallio produced life-size reconstructions of the long-extinct dodo bird in their natural habitat of Mauritius Island, the only place on earth where dodos ever existed.

The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters is a dialogue between the mythical, art historical, and biological dodo. This strange, flightless giant pigeon was eradicated between 1662 and 1693 when Dutch settlers destroyed the dodos' forest habitat and introduced invasive predators that the dodo had never had before. 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.

Thanks to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865); the dodo is our most well-known extinct species, living 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."

Archival Pigment Print
Paper Size: 12 3/16 x 23 3/4 inches
Image Size: 8 1/4 x 19 6/16 inches
Edition of 50 and 5 Artist’s Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Harri Kallio (b. 1970, Salla, Finland) is an American-Finish photographer, living and working in New York City since 2001. He received an MFA in photography from the University of Arts and Design, in Helsinki, in 2002. Kallio’s work has appeared in a variety of international publications such as the New York Times, Le Monde2, Lapham’s Quarterly, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Universum Magazin (Austria), Citizen K, El Pais Semanal (Spain), DPI Magazine (Taiwan), Falter Magazine (UK), Harper’s Magazine, “Photography” (South Korea), and Aperture. In 2006, his work was featured at the George Eastman House exhibition “Why Look at Animals” and at the International Center of Photography’s “Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video”. Most recently, Kallio exhibited his work in “Rare Bird: John James Audubon and Contemporary Art” exhibition at the Berman Museum, in Collegeville, PA, and “Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity” at the Whatcom Museum, in Bellingham, WA.