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“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”


Dionne Brand

Tawny Pipit

work in progress

Northern Italian, Spanish, and French bird song imitators, or Cioccolatore, adapt their centuries old cultural tradition  to embody an archive of critically endangered and regionally extinct migratory bird calls.

Sol Archer and Giulia Zabarella
Film
2025 -

Exhibition edit: 12:56
Cinematic Release: TBD
4:3 UHD 4K Stereo Audio
Spoken:
Exhibition edit: N/A
Documentary edit: Italian, English, Catalan, French, Spanish






Featuring

THE SWALLOW, 
THE YELLOWHAMMER 
Graziano Manganelli 

THE WOODLARK 
Paolo Pasqualetti 

THE BUNTING 
Costante Biz 

THE HOUSE SPARROW, 
THE COMMON LINNET,
THE SKYLARK 
Salvador Aguilella Alegre 

THE WRYNECK, 
THE SKYLARK
Claudio Pin

THE WRYNECK ,
CETTI’S WARBLER
Ettore Scabin

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.

Tawny Pipit is an in-progress ethnofiction project across film, photography, writing, and music, in collaboration with Giulia Zabarella and practitioners of Cioccolo, in which we are producing an archive both of the sonic life being snuffed out by environmental catastrophe, and a rapidly disappearing regional practice.

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.”*

Check back in late 2025 for information on release and exhibition dates.

*Jean-Christophe Bailly

film stills
photographic series
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