Migratory Birds Pt.1
Short Film
2022
7.14 min.
8mm
8mm found footage from Bulgarian Archives and Vienna Film Archive
Sound
Link upon request
Would you ask a bird where it’s from?
“Cultural identities come from somewhere, they have histories. But like everything else that is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture, and power. Far from being the mere recovery of a past, waiting to be found, and once found will secure our sense of self into eternity, identities are the different names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past.”
—Stuart Hall
2022
7.14 min.
8mm
8mm found footage from Bulgarian Archives and Vienna Film Archive
Sound
Link upon request
Would you ask a bird where it’s from?
“Cultural identities come from somewhere, they have histories. But like everything else that is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture, and power. Far from being the mere recovery of a past, waiting to be found, and once found will secure our sense of self into eternity, identities are the different names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past.”
—Stuart Hall
The voice of collective memory—the voice of the birds, my own voice recorded in passage on trains, planes and busses traveling “home” an auditory displacement.
Speaking in my mother tongue I bring in the “I” here, as I too owe something to this narrative and to the stories of those who are not able to speak. The subtitled text remains in Bulgarian in an effort to bring forth the feeling of being abroad, attempting to hear with your eyes.
A set of questions are repeated: “Where are you from? Will you stay here? What are you doing here?” I recall the last time in the border-control line for “non-US residents,” echoing in the undertone of the delivery. The voice cautions about asking these redundant questions of origin with care, to not presume that “I” am not from “here.” If this were the case, then where am “I” from, and does “here” then belong to “you” or “you” to it?
Derived from an interest in the topic of diasporic women, my work Migratory Birds Pt. 1 (2022) serves both as a personal prologue to a future project and as part of a conversation with my previous project While I Still Have a Voice. Through the work, I seek to draw attention to several questions regarding belonging, nationality, and the conflicts that arise from not heeding Stuart Hall’s message to avoid the categorization of others into singular national identities based on sociopolitical and consumerist ideologies.
The images filmed in 8mm and pulled from archives themselves know no belonging, pixelated and thrown aside, displaced out takes akin to Hito Steyerl’s “poor images”. Shown in combination with the tone of the scientific text borrowed from Stuart Weidensaul, author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (1999), and personal prose, attempt to reflect on the loss and sacrifice made by those in search of belonging and refuge, questioning the tall tales of places that promise “sinews of peace” one day and suppression the next. Demographics show that women make up nearly 50 percent of the world’s migratory population—but how often are we confronted with their narratives?