Echoing his own Greco-Albanian ancestry, the artist explored the local resonances between Aristophanes' ancient comedy The Birds (as discussed in Plato's Republic), in which two Athenians turn to the world of birds to try to imagine a better form of politics, and the Shuar myth of Yápankam, in which the birds teach humans to live peacefully together, in harmony with nature. 

This living monument is a sanctuary for avian life. It is made up of plants donated by people involved in the conservation of the forest ecosystem. Flowers, shrubs and fruit trees are selected for their symbiotic relationship with certain bird species. This mini-forest offers an experimental model of urban orni-reforestation thanks to the dispersal of seeds by the birds that take refuge there.

Arriving in Macas in the middle of a municipal election, the artist took inspiration from the different types of the campaign vehicles used by the candidates. The project has developed into a mobile platform for collecting plants, cataloguing the sounds of Amazonian birds, and a venue for workshops and meetings between environmental initiative holders. 

A bamboo orchid (Arundina graminifolia) on its way to the bus terminal in Macas.
Connected to the country's road infrastructure just 30 years ago, this once-isolated Amazonian town is rapidly expanding, attracting newcomers from Ecuador and beyond. 

The instigators of bird-friendly practices (gardening, agriculture, etc.) are relatively isolated or marginalised from the dominant extractive paradigm. Through the collaborative process developed by the project, this urban forest is establishing a network of ecological refuges and bringing together people concerned with the conservation of flora and fauna with an intercultural outlook. 

Flags were created in collaboration with local artists: signs for an imaginary institution, in order to learn forms of buen vivir from natural systems. The work invites us to decentralise the human element in intercultural considerations of the rights of nature. It is a micro-utopia that proposes to explore models of shared cities that make new animal-plant-human worlds possible. 

A publication edited by the artist accompanies the project, combining archival research, an investigation into the migratory and intercultural dynamics of the territory, interviews with indigenous leaders, activists and researchers on the conception of nature in social struggles and the new Ecuadorian constitution. 

For its inauguration, the artist invited numerous cultural collectives from the region to respond to the work in a performative fashion. The Kuamar community theatre group, which practises a theatre of the oppressed in the Shuar language, staged the story of Yápankam, a social and ecological fable in which a turtle dove teaches young Etsa how to give life back to the birds he has hunted to the last, and how to defend himself from the demon Iwia. 

Observing an orange-winged Amazon (Amazona amazonica), a species that inhabits the Amazon rainforest and sometimes ventures into urban areas. During his investigation, Stéphane Bottéro met with biologists from the National Institute for Biodiversity (INABIO) to better understand the specific features shared between certain birds and certain plants that inform migration and evolution trajectories and can sometimes be hard to predict. 

In a region marked by dynamics of hierarchisation, power and conflict rooted in successive processes of colonisation, acculturation and extraction, La République des Oiseaux has contributed, through the eco-social process and the inaugural festival, to generating commonality in the city, by reconfiguring relations of shared presence and visibility between various indigenous, mestizo and settler groups.