Scavengers
Cover Story, November 2026
Vultures gather on a mountainside in Lucy Beech’s “Scavengers” (2026), one of the highlights of ‘To pass from one dream to another’, the current Biennale de Lyon. A marauding mob of bird bodies presses together, feeding on carrion. The 28 minute film centres on a feeding station that farmers, vets, and conservationists maintain as part of a vulture reintroduction programme in southern France. The historic persecution of the raptors as grotesque villains and scapegoats, Beech underlines, maligns their highly complex and beneficial role. The birds’ key “service” of mitigating diseases, redistributing nutrients, and bolstering ecosystemic resilience is one of the several layered notions of “poetic economy” that the Biennale evokes.
Despite such memorable works, as Max Andrews’ review of the Biennale in Frieze argues, the breadth of agendas “allows this edition to drift into something ambient and effusive, which feels equivocal amid France’s current political polarization.” The exhibition’s poetry and dream imagery needs more wake-up calls to “keep dreams from curdling into nightmares.”
Less than a month after the opening, protests over the cost of living and school conditions turned to violent looting across France. In Lyon the tourist office was burnt out and shops were ransacked along the Rue de la République. In Limoges, where the town hall was set ablaze, an official spoke of a “horde sauvage”. A week later further marches in city centres were met with more tear gas, and, over in the art world, Art Basel Paris cancelled its public weekend.
What separates scavenging from looting is rarely the act of taking, but the complexities of collective care and responsibility. Images of chaotic crowds, too, are seldom what they first seem. The Biennale envisages an economy in which imagination trumps profit and exploitation. Yet amid ongoing political, social, and environmental instability across Europe and beyond, Beech’s attention to the vitality of this vulture rewilding programme perhaps points to what such imagining would actually require: coordinated cross-national initiatives, patient negotiation between parties, expertise as much as enthusiasm, and regulation that repairs, but also a refusal of inherited narratives of the mob and of projected fears around transgression.
Despite such memorable works, as Max Andrews’ review of the Biennale in Frieze argues, the breadth of agendas “allows this edition to drift into something ambient and effusive, which feels equivocal amid France’s current political polarization.” The exhibition’s poetry and dream imagery needs more wake-up calls to “keep dreams from curdling into nightmares.”
Less than a month after the opening, protests over the cost of living and school conditions turned to violent looting across France. In Lyon the tourist office was burnt out and shops were ransacked along the Rue de la République. In Limoges, where the town hall was set ablaze, an official spoke of a “horde sauvage”. A week later further marches in city centres were met with more tear gas, and, over in the art world, Art Basel Paris cancelled its public weekend.
What separates scavenging from looting is rarely the act of taking, but the complexities of collective care and responsibility. Images of chaotic crowds, too, are seldom what they first seem. The Biennale envisages an economy in which imagination trumps profit and exploitation. Yet amid ongoing political, social, and environmental instability across Europe and beyond, Beech’s attention to the vitality of this vulture rewilding programme perhaps points to what such imagining would actually require: coordinated cross-national initiatives, patient negotiation between parties, expertise as much as enthusiasm, and regulation that repairs, but also a refusal of inherited narratives of the mob and of projected fears around transgression.
- COVER STORY, NOVEMBER 2026
Scavengers
Cover Story, November 2026
Cover Story ArchiveVultures gather on a mountainside in Lucy Beech’s “Scavengers” (2026), one of the highlights of ‘To pass from one dream to another’, the current Biennale de Lyon. A marauding mob of bird bodies presses together, feeding on carrion. The 28 minute film centres on a feeding station that farmers, vets, and conservationists maintain as part of a vulture reintroduction programme in southern France. The historic persecution of the raptors as grotesque villains and scapegoats, Beech underlines, maligns their highly complex and beneficial role. The birds’ key “service” of mitigating diseases, redistributing nutrients, and bolstering ecosystemic resilience is one of the several layered notions of “poetic economy” that the Biennale evokes.
Despite such memorable works, as Max Andrews’ review of the Biennale in Frieze argues, the breadth of agendas “allows this edition to drift into something ambient and effusive, which feels equivocal amid France’s current political polarization.” The exhibition’s poetry and dream imagery needs more wake-up calls to “keep dreams from curdling into nightmares.”
Less than a month after the opening, protests over the cost of living and school conditions turned to violent looting across France. In Lyon the tourist office was burnt out and shops were ransacked along the Rue de la République. In Limoges, where the town hall was set ablaze, an official spoke of a “horde sauvage”. A week later further marches in city centres were met with more tear gas, and, over in the art world, Art Basel Paris cancelled its public weekend.
What separates scavenging from looting is rarely the act of taking, but the complexities of collective care and responsibility. Images of chaotic crowds, too, are seldom what they first seem. The Biennale envisages an economy in which imagination trumps profit and exploitation. Yet amid ongoing political, social, and environmental instability across Europe and beyond, Beech’s attention to the vitality of this vulture rewilding programme perhaps points to what such imagining would actually require: coordinated cross-national initiatives, patient negotiation between parties, expertise as much as enthusiasm, and regulation that repairs, but also a refusal of inherited narratives of the mob and of projected fears around transgression.