Tawny Pipit

archive of disappearance

Sol Archer and Giulia Zabarella
2026

Exhibition edit: 12:56
Cinematic Release: 43:57

4:3 UHD 4K
Stereo Audio

Spoken:
Exhibition edit: N/A
Documentary edit: Italian, English, Catalan, French, Spanish

We are witness to the extinguishing of many worlds and ways of worlding. To the extinctions of ecosystems and inherited relations to them.

In Tawny Pipit we worked with Northern Italian, Spanish, and French bird song imitators, or Chioccolatori, to adapt their millenia old knowledge to produce an archive of critically endangered and regionally extinct migratory bird calls, across film, photography, writing, workshop, sculpture, and performance, as they are embodied in co-terminously endangered folk practice.

As the sonic signature of the changing seasons becomes hushed under overwhelming environmental pressure, traditional practices of relating between human and other-than-human cultures fade, becoming unmoored folk acts

Since at least 1273 Sacile, a small town in Northeast Italy, has hosted an annual competition of bird-call imitation, traditionally one element of a complex geographically situated and technical poaching practice for catching migratory birds. For millennia, rural communities survival depended on the seasonal arrival of birds migrating between Africa and Northern Europe, and rich complex identities and traditions grew around this, of bird imitation, of aesthetics, of biome cultivation, of self-hood. A delicate balance was maintained between capture, cultivating forestry to support their quarry, and an obsessive attachment to migrating song birds and their music. Etruscan painted vases and tombs, Roman mosaics, and opera chart the persistence of the intimate knowledge of bird catchers across centuries.

Over the past forty years, however, global bird populations have collapsed catastrophically. The thundering progress of ecological catastrophe, climate change, habitat loss, monocultural agro-toxins, novel diseases, predatory house pets, and invasive architecture have devastated wild avian populations to the extent that if any particular species survives at 40% of the numbers it had thirty years ago, it is considered to be coping exceptionally well. Political responses to holders of traditional knowledge, such as poachers, themselves as much an indicator species of ecological disregulation as their birds they pursue are heavily regulated. The Chioccolo - the oeuvre of call imitations - now exists only as a dwindling spectacle of skill performed by shrinking numbers of Chioccolatore for aging audiences.

With Chioccolatori and avian migration researcher Riccardo Ton, we conceived a new category for the competition in Sacile; that of the bird species which are regionally critically endangered or already extinct, and as such increasingly exist only in the embodied folk archive of this concurrently vanishing tradition. Together we registered this performance of an archive of both the sonic life being snuffed out by environmental catastrophe and a rapidly disappearing trans-mediterranean practice.

On mimesis, machismo, identity, and the passing on of knowledge. The project is a registration of a dual extinction, of bird species and their songs, and of cultural relations to the non-human world: A celebration; a grieving; a proposition for re-emergence; and a swan song. On mimesis, imitation, and becoming other-than-just human. A registration of avian cultures as they disappear, and a celebration of the performance traditions people across the Mediterranean have used to mediate between human and non-human worlds for centuries, a registration of the hunters “lost intimacy” with “animals' worlds and ways of being in the world.”*

We launched the exhibition form of this project on February 28th 2026 at CIAP Vassiviere, France with film, photography, and sculptural installation, accompanied by performances and workshops from Master Chioccolatore Ettore Scabin and a publication featuring writing commissioned from Riccardo Ton.

Publication featuring specially commissioned text from Riccardo Ton and risographed drawings by Giulia Zabarella
Available at CIAP Vassiviere or by email on request.

Featuring

BARN SWALLOW:
Graziano Manganelli

BLACKBIRD:
Ettore Scabin

CETTI’S WARBLER:
Ettore Scabin

COMMON LINNET:
Salvador Aguilella Alegre

HOUSE SPARROW:
Salvador Aguilella Alegre

NIGHTINGALE:
Claudio Pin

YOUNG NIGHTINGALE:
Vincent Bonini

ORTOLAN BUNTING:
Costante “Il Poiana” Biz

REDWING:
Olivier Bonini

YOUNG REDWING:
Vincent Bonini

SKYLARK:
Claudio Pin
Salvador Aguilella Alegre

SONG THRUSH:
Camillo Prosdocimo
Simeon Garcia Silvestre
Olivier Bonini

YOUNG SONG THRUSH:
Vincent Bonini

WOODLARK:
Paolo Pasqualetti

WRYNECK:
Ettore Scabin
Claudio Pin

YELLOWHAMMER
Graziano Manganelli

&

Enrico Berto
Isidro Puertes Deseo
Jean Claude Pinotti

VOICEOVERS:
Stefano
Riccardo Ton
Ettore Scabin

SCIENTIFIC CONSULTATION:
Riccardo Ton,
avian researcher at the University of
Valencia (ES)

installation photography at CIAP Vassiviere courtesy Aurelien Mole

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