Catherine Clover
Catherine Clover The Observer's Book of Birds by Stephana Vere Benson, 1972 edition.
In my multidisciplinary art practice I work with listening, sound, language and the more-than-human world. The urgency of the environmental crisis calls for a different way of being and my work seeks to, in the words of philosopher Vinciane Despret, identify shared multispecies territories particularly within the urban setting.
Starting on 1 April, my residency with the Writer's Room coincided with the migratory birds who were starting to fly north to nest, many of whom choose the green parks of London as their destination. Their voices will soon be heard once again across the city after their long long journeys from their winter homes in many African nations.
I am planning on producing a publication of scores based on their voices and languages.
The route these birds fly is known as the East Atlantic Flyway and I am looking at the idea of the Acoustic Commons (thank you Ella Finer for your careful thinking on this) in terms of the shared sounds across geographies with the millions of birds that fly north and south twice a year on this route.
At the conclusion of the residency I invited 7 other artists - Melissa Alley, Remiiya Badru, Fabienne Formosa, Iris Garrelfs, Shauna Laurel Jones, Caroline Kennedy and Dr. Yewande Okuleye - for public performances/interventions on site and the images below show some of those performances:
