As Birds Flying

In a world of political unrest and total surveillance, suspicion and paranoia can become normalized. In 2013, news stories told of a fisherman in Egypt who spotted a migratory stork fitted with an electronic device on its right leg. Fearing foreign tampering, the fisherman reported the bird. The animal was apprehended by the Egyptian authorities on suspicion of espionage. The would-be ‘spying device’ on the stork was later shown to be a scientific tracking device used by Hungarian scientists to follow the stork’s migratory patterns. In its footage of birds flocking or perched alone, the film resonates with contemporary political tensions between individualism and crowds, and questions whether birds of a feather really do flock together. The work also considers what it would look like to take literally the dubious narratives constructed by repressive governments, and the flocks of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking that thus arise.