Birdland Update

This is some sparrows on the side of Burngreave cemetery Chapel I like them because they nestle into the building.  Where I come from we called them Spuggies and it's one of the few birds I ever shot with my air riffle.  I shot it in the eye and it fluttered as it fell from the tree. I had a sense of guilt and accomplishment.  I picked it up and fed it to the next door cat, perhaps somehow making the deed useful would redeem me from the futility of it's death.

Next week I'm attending a seminar about the German philosopher Ernst Block  he writes about the ways stories can be layered and folded to make a sense of things. Infact he says that this is the only way to make sense of things as nothing is ever complete we live in a state of the "Not yet".  I like this as a way to look at the idea of "birdland" that the landscape is a "not yet" continually in a state of becoming.

So are we "At home in Birdland" The book from where our project title evolved.  I think so, I'm interested in the way that the series of projections we are planning has evolved into a series of opportunities for other people to make work.  So our two resident artists are now thinking about how their work can be a projection in one of it's iterations. Or perhaps through force of will and vision reject an opportunity to use our giant projector.  Their work is looking interesting and needs to be sat on like a giant egg.

We have had two walks one on the suggestion of Laura Sillars along the five weirs walk and one to the Monsal viaduct with David Gilbert and Adam O'Meara.  I really enjoyed both as I chose to not take any form of recording equipment with me - no camera or phone or sound recorder I think I was interested in been more present, for my senses to be the way I interacted without mediating the experience through any type of lens.  I could say that I'm interested in the phenomenology of walking but I think I am sick of having to make something material from an experience as Henry Thoreau would say

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.”

 

 So I have nothing to show from the walks but thoughts and memories and stories.  As we walked from Bakewell to Buxton along the valley a man asked me to look out for his hat which he had lost and post it through the door of the town hall in Bakewell.  We never found the hat but I often think about it.

Anyway back to Block and making sense of things in his book "Traces" he tells a story of three men who are interested in food and they stuff a small bird probably a sparrow with an Olive they then stuff a blackbird with the sparrow and a duck with the blackbird and a peacock with the duck and a swan with the peacock and a pig with the swan and a cow with the pig and a horse with the cow.  They then cook the whole thing for an age.

 

The men then remove the olive from the sparrow and eat it and one says to the other that "The pig was too old" they all agree.

 

This is my re-imagining of this story but it is what I was meaning about the not yet space of meaning - this story could be seen as a fable but if we think of it as a glimpse of a obscured thing rather than a metaphor we can perhaps see the Birdland project as a series of stories where a not yet understanding of landscape can evolve  and in a way through this idea of a multi-modal anthology we can move things on a bit.