Etudes for birds, 2020

Installation: Sound piece 2 min 50 s, a seat made of ghillie camouflage blanket, Études pour les oiseaux publication, 16 pages, 20 x 29 cm In the piece Etudes for birds I study language, mimicry and interspecies communication. I’m interested in translations and the knowledge that can be gained or lost in the translation process. I’m also interested in the relationship between the original and (fabricated) imitation. One of the starting points of the work is the idea of mimicry as an interspecies pidgin language. For the piece I’ve studied bird language and spectrograms as visualizations of the bird sounds. First I’ve imitated the bird vocalizations by drawing, then translated the drawings into sounds as spectrograms and finally collected the drawn sounds into a constructed soundscape. I’ve also played the drawn sounds for the birds in the Central Park of Helsinki. Through mimicry I try to understand the point of view of the other; I try to become someone else to feel empathy for other beings. The soundscape based on the drawings in the Études pour les oiseaux publication can also be listened at: www.leenasaarinen.com/etudes