What Birds Talk About When They Talk (2021)
What Birds Talk About When They Talk is a video animation that humorously ventures into the stakes of interpretation. Through a cross-cultural collection of references culled from mythology, science, cartoons, and literature, the piece conflates the historic and the contemporary to create a portrait of birds’ distinct voices and the fascination they exercise on humans.
Propelled by a soundtrack of calling, drumming, tweeting, rattling, duetting, screaming, mocking, conversing, news reporting, philosophizing, and prophesising birds, the work invites us to consider the effects of our interpretative acts: Do they foster connections across difference or limit our understanding of what nonhuman animals can think and do?
The translations presented in the piece reflect the continuity or discontinuity humans imagine between themselves and birds, from objects to talk about to subjects that can be talked with.
What Birds Talk About When They Talk, 2021, HD video, 26 min. 28 s. The video exists in English and in French. Installation view, Ulrich Museum.
