In 1997, Maurizio Cattelan was one of the youngest Italian artists at the Venice Biennale. There, he presented his “Turisti” for the first time:
“I had gone to see the pavilion in Venice about a month before the exhibition opened. The inside was a mess and was full, really full, of pigeons. For me, as an Italian, it was like seeing something you shouldn’t see, like the Pope’s dressing room. But then again, this is the situation in Venice, so I thought I’d present it as it is, a normal situation. And of course, where there are pigeons, there’s pigeon shit.”
(Interview with Nancy Spector, F. Bonami, N. Spector, B. Vanderlinden, Maurizio Cattelan, London, 2000, pp. 18-22).
The installation includes a variable number of taxidermied pigeons (or their representations) scattered throughout the exhibition space. The work evokes the familiar image of abandoned urban spaces overrun by birds, while the title alludes both to the pigeons and to the visitors who flock to the Lagoon for the Biennale every two years.