Free as Birds
2024 - ongoing
Photography, Video installation, Sound, and Performance
Free as Birds is a long-term, multi-chapter interdisciplinary exploration of the parallel journeys of birds and humans. The project interrogates humanity’s primal and universal association of birds with freedom, a vision now reshaped by contemporary realities of displacement, restricted mobility, and environmental devastation. Through photography, video installation, sound, and live performance, it examines how these entangled themes manifest across different cultural and ecological contexts.
Developed through artist residencies and collaborations with local communities in places such as Suomenlinna (Finland), Corsica (France), Mallorca (Spain), Crete (Greece), and Örö (Finland), each chapter responds to specific local conditions. While the project takes diverse forms depending on place and context, its core intention remains to imagine how voices—human, nonhuman, and artificial—can carry stories of fragility, resistance, and belonging across borders and species.
One significant strand of experiments with the dialogue between AI as a language model and the human voice, one of the oldest modes of communication. In these chapters, local birdsongs are carefully studied and translated into speculative “bird languages,” which are then reinterpreted and performed through traditional vocal practices such as Corsican polyphony, Cretan Rizitika, Mongolian long song, and Nordic kulning. This process results in new, site-specific bird choirs that merge environmental soundscapes, AI-generated voices, and human singing into hybrid sonic experiences.
Each chapter has its unique focus: in Finland, the project explores intersections of immigration, identity, and ecological vulnerability; in Crete, children’s imaginative voices construct utopian responses to displacement and climate anxiety; in Mallorca, an elderly choir reflects on memory, aging, and the reimagining of freedom through intergenerational song.
Click on the images to view the project in each chapter
Free as Birds I: Migrating (FI), 2024 - Ongoing
Free as Birds II: Lighthouse Polyphonic (FR), 2025
Free as Birds III: Singing Rizitika in Cloudcuckooland (GR) , 2025
Free as Birds IV: Ocell Emigrador: Those Who Flew Before Me (ES), 2025
Supported by institutions including Nordic Culture Point, Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture, Island Connect (Creative Europe), and MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre, Free as Birds forms a growing, dispersed archive of speculative bird choirs. Although created in isolated locations, these chapters collectively form an interconnected sonic ecosystem—an imagined choir that invites listeners to rethink freedom not as escape, but as a rooted, shared connection.
The project’s final presentation will take the form of a multi-channel video installation, multiple photographic series, and live bird choir concerts. In this culmination, the narratives from each island are woven together through imagined bird languages, creating a chorus of voices that echo and respond to one another across distance, like a choir of dispersed yet connected birdsong.