Assisted by Birds

At the core of the project is a series of forest stories published in Arabic by a village writer. The artist, Axel visited the writer and listened to her recite the various stories. “I wanted to learn how to tell them too,” he says. In addition to this recorded material, Axel says the installation includes birdsong from the forest, as well as snippets from a paper an ecologist delivered on the forest and sounds from one of the factories. “It’s amazing how these machines resonate in this space,” he says, “and the piece will have Arabic, English, French, Spanish [a snippet from Ariel Ramrez’s “Missa Creola”, so no one will understand all of it. But I just like the sounds of it, actually, more than the meanings. I’d like to work it as a musical piece, rather than simply, for its meaning.”