Hornero Nests in the Dordogne

Residency project in La Moissie Creative Residency, Belves, France. June 2025.

10 nests created with native earth and clay, installed across different areas of the residency house and throughout the village over the course of three weeks.

Upon arriving at the residency, located in Belvès—a French commune in the Dordogne department of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region—I was overcome by questions of disorientation: Where am I? What am I doing here? Why did I come? Where do I come from? What connects me to this place? What do I bring with me?

La Moissie is a residency in a unique space, hidden in a small medieval village in the southwest of France, that hosts and supports the creative processes of artists from around the world. I was the only artist from South America, and from Montevideo, Uruguay, 10,500 km away.

Many of the hornero nests were made site specific on different surfaces, using the earth that surrounded me, as in the case of the garden sculptures. Others were produced in my studio and later installed on site.

Horneros (Furnarius) are native species of South America known for building their own nests out of mud and straw, shaped like a clay oven—hence their name. They are an emblematic bird of the region, and their nests can be found everywhere: on light poles, windows, sculptures and public monuments, rooftops, trees, and other elevated, open supports.

They build their nests in pairs, usually constructing one per breeding cycle. They typically begin with the base, then the side walls and roof, and finally an inner dividing wall where the female lays the eggs. This wall protects and shelters them. In making the nests, I followed the same sequence of actions as the birds. A hornero does not reuse the same nest twice, so the nests are later inhabited by other species.

Site specific nest installed on the garden sculptures.

I appropriate a South American symbol and relocate it, decontextualized, into a distant territory. I build my own nests using the earth from a 17th-century house, imbued with another history and another culture. By intervening in the village with these forms, I carry with me the identity of my country and question notions of migration, displacement, and home.

The gesture of making a nest—of building a shelter wherever one finds oneself—thus becomes a reflection on the very act of dwelling. My intervention enters into dialogue with the memory and history of the place. In France, the hornero does not exist: it is not native, it does not belong. Its absence resonates with my own experience: I am the only person from South America, and specifically from Uruguay.

In this way, by placing each nest, I also construct my own. In this new environment, I build my own home.

Site specific nest installed in the entrance of the house.

To create the different nests, I collected soil from various areas of the garden. I experimented with the soil from the north side—moist, with abundant native and wild vegetation—and from the south side—dry, brittle, very clay-rich, and slow to absorb water. I found that the most resistant soil came from the northern garden, but I mixed it with soil taken from beneath fruit trees, as it proved to be more durable.

Small wooden house, south-side garden.

I placed the nests in the spaces I inhabited and moved through daily, from corners of the garden to familiar sites throughout the village.

Nest on the Church of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption. 13th–15th century.

After several days of drying in the summer sun, the nests gradually hardened and became stronger. Many are still standing to this day (october 2025). However, during the final week of the residency, a strong tropical storm hit and deformed several of the nests, destroying the large one that was located by the pool.

It proposes a new narrative about the way we inhabit the world: an identity built in movement, like a nest that is rebuilt each time we arrive in a new place.

Pictures by ©Luisa Leborgne