Free as Birds III
Singing Rizitika in Cloudcuckooland
2025
Photography, Video Installation, Sound Art, Performance
Created during the Artist Residency of E75 Art Bus by MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre (FI) and METAXOTO Dance School (GR) for European Capital City Oulu 2026.
Free as Birds: Singing Rizitika in Cloudcuckooland is a poetic, collaborative work that explores freedom, imagination, and resistance through the voices and visions of children. Developed during a six-week artist residency in Crete, this new chapter of the long-term project Free as Birds invites a group of local girls, to collectively reimagine a new world—a Cloudcuckooland—through photography, sound, and movement.
Drawing inspiration from Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy The Birds, in which birds build a sky-city to escape the failings of human society, and from rizitika, the traditional polyphonic Cretan singing form rooted in collective memory and resistance, this work blends fiction, ritual, and lived experience. Instead of adult protagonists, here, children become the founders of a new mythical nation. Each child assumes a unique bird identity and declares her own "constitution of freedom" through spontaneous gestures, song, and choral expression.
Through a process of participatory workshops, the children designed translucent wings and beaks, composed and sang imagined birdsongs. They performed gentle, collective rituals in sites of ancient ruins. The result is a multi-sensory installation combining photography, video installation, and a soundscape of chorus, breath, and birdsong, culminating in a performance .
This work responds to the harsh realities of children’s displacement, loss of homeland and even lives, and ecological collapse, from a perspective of luminous defiance. In a world constrained by borders, conflicts, and societal collapse, the children’s imagined Cloudcuckooland becomes a site of soft power and radical hope. Speaking not only from fantasy, but from futures they long to shape, their voices remind us that imagination itself can be a form of resistance—and that utopia, though fragile, can be sung into being.
Supported by:
E75 Art Bus Residency, MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Center, METAXOTO Dance School
With special thanks to Henrik Åkerberg and the children of Crete