The Birds Are Back

The Birds Are Back, 1999 - 2002

Edward Hillel

"He turns away to the trees around us. The others also. They listen closely. No, it's not the silence. They have noticed nothing, did not hear the silence. It's me who is shocking them. Nothing else, it seems.

No more birds, I say, continuing my thought. The smoke from the crematorium chased them away. Never again will there be birds in this forest…"
-Jorge Semprun, "Writing or Life", 1997

In 1945 at the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp, as World War II  finally came to an end, prisoner Jorge Semprun (later a famous novelist, scriptwriter and Spain's Minister of Culture) explains to Allied soldiers why the birds forever abandoned Germany's largest forest preserve. The Birds Are Back proclaims that the birds have finally returned.

The Birds Are Back is a site-specific interactive environment I want to design and produce in an exhibition space and hopefully tour. It is a new and original work, and it culminates a process begun in 1999 in Weimar, where I was invited to create an installation at the Museum of Modern Art there, the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar. The installation references a landscape where creation and destruction have so often collided. Weimar and Buchenwald are one and the same place. Conflicting ideologies, the human and the inhuman, Goethe and Hitler, beauty and horror, life and death: the best and worst of western culture are confronted face to face. Ultimately The Birds Are Back is about our own inner landscape, where good and evil collide in big and small ways everyday.

The Birds Are Back will be designed in a style I call "minimalist baroque", combining archaeology and technology to bring together documentary and fictional elements in a user-friendly space for all ages. Like a forest, it can be used as a stage (performances, readings), a laboratory (educational programs for children), and an inspirational resting place (contemplating the exhibition).

The site-specific environment will bring together a selection of diverse elements created and collected with the participation of students from the Bauhaus in Weimar. These include:-

  1. The Birds Are Back I-XVI:  photographs and film imagine the return of the birds to Weimar
  2. Die Rückker der Vögel (The Birds Are Back): video (16') documents a public performance of two young people parading a sandwich-board poster around Weimar that anounces "The Birds Are Back"
  3. Stones: 22 actual black limestones that were quarried by prisoners in Buchenwald to build "the road of death" between the concentration camp and the Weimar railway station
  4. Aktions I-IV:  photographs of impromptu shrines built by students in the forest of Buchenwald
  5. Weimar Klassic I-XXX:  photographs interpret landscapes of classical Weimar
  6. Buchen Wald (The Beech Forest): photographs portray the present-day site
  7. Aktions V-VI: 2-channel video projection of mimetic performances in Weimar
  8. The Rise and Fall of the Modern: photos and video create a dialogue between art and National Socialist ideology
  9. Where The Birds Are: an original CD of bird recordings (20')
  10. Washing The Stones: DVD projection of an actor washing the stones in the Weimar exhibition site (26')

The final design and choice of elements to be included in this work could be a collaborative process with the curators of the hosting institution. I anticipate a combination of projected images (TV monitors, wall, projections, slides), sounds (actors' voices, soundtrack of birds), drawings, photos and natural elements (stones, trees) in a lounge-type comfortable space. I also foresee possibilities for creative contributions from the public during the period of the exhibition (making birds and small shrines – drawings, collages, nature), and a series of educational events organized around the installation. Through the evidence of powerful historical content and a contemporary use of media and materials, The Birds Are Back should spark the viewer's imagination about our lives and responsibilities today.