The Bird

• The Bird
• 2018
• Video recording of performance
• 4 minutes

The video recording, of the performance called The Bird, represents a new stage in the formal, media reasearch and consideration of the aspects of communication, interraction, synergy in the context of collective existence, work and action.

The four-minute-long video documents the quiet meeting of the two artists which is occasionally disrupted by the short, uncomfortable attempts to make the bird to fly away. This is not possible, however, because the bird is tied to the skin of the artist’s arm by a very thin chain. The bird becomes the third, and the most important, participant in the definition of the course of action of the scene which culminates in one, tentatively sad, moment of verbal communication between the artists, i.e. Sanja’s whispering to Ranko.

Equally, led by the controlled and the uncontrolled movement of the bird, the silent dialogue of the artists is conducted through the openness and spontaneity of their reactions in the given situation. Determining the tone of what is, at the moment. formed as a process of exchange between Sanja and Ranko, the presence of the bird, personifies not only the nature of an already formed relationship, but also the complexity of the human relations one can assume. Those relations are shaped and realised in all those visible and invisible flows and shapes of mutuality, immediacy, closeness, manipulation, tensions, flexibility, verbalised and the suppressed.

The symbolic frame of the action is additionally emphasized by the very choice of the bird, the starling, the species characterised by the pronounced sociability and the ability to mimic and vocalise complex sounds. In that context, the myriad of further possible associations and connotations of this performance is opened to the topics and issues of the dynamics of social space and the implied values of dialogue, empathy, trust and the spirit of togetherness.