Free as Birds IV:
Ocell Emigrador: Those Who Flew Before Me
2025
Photography, video installation, participatory performance, and voice-based soundwork
Created during the Island Connect artist residency in C.IN.E, Mallorca, 2025
Ocell Emigrador: Those Who Flew Before Me is an interdisciplinary project created in the village of Sineu, Mallorca, in collaboration with a local choir of elders. It combines photography, video projection, participatory ritual, and sound installation to explore memory, transformation, and imagined freedom through the metaphor of birds and flight.
This work continues my series Free as Birds, which reflects on aging, migration, and ecological grief. It responds to a world where voices and habitats are equally at risk of vanishing. Singing becomes a way of reclaiming space, and imagining becomes a form of quiet resistance.
The title comes from a haunting line by Mallorcan poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel:
"Ocell emigrador que vas i véns / Pensa només que aquell és el fossar dels meus ocells d’infància"
("Migratory bird who comes and goes... Just remember that place is the graveyard of my childhood birds.")
To reimagine this line across time and species, I used AI to translate the poem into the imagined language of local birds. The result was a new sonic poem:
"ti‑ti‑ti‑whee, ti-kee ti-kee swooe‑eh,
wee‑kee‑waa swo‑kaa ti‑kaa;
wee‑kee‑waa swo‑kee ki‑waa tsee‑ah."
These sounds formed the basis of a choral score, which I taught to the elders. Together we sang this invented birdsong, imagining ourselves as birds.
Inside an old, echoing hall with bare concrete walls, the elders wore translucent paper wings and moved with light and shadow. Their voices, drawn from memory or improvisation, became part of a ritual shaped by image and sound. Video projections layered their movement with aerial imagery, suggesting a kind of flight that was not physical but spiritual.
The piece also draws on Mallorcan oral folklore. In some villages, people speak of mythical “wind birds” that guide souls across the sea at the end of life. These birds are symbols of transition, linking freedom with the unknown. In this project, I trace a similar movement. The elders’ singing becomes a quiet migration through time—toward childhood, toward endings, and toward something beyond language.
To become a bird is not only to escape but to remember. It is to reimagine the body, the voice, and the landscape as part of a shared flight. In this work, I hope to offer a space where dreaming of freedom becomes both a gesture of defiance and a tender form of return.
This project will be presented as a photography series, a video and sound installation, and a live performance.