Archive of Disappearances

Sol Archer received a grant for the development of a new film in collaboration with Giulia Zabarella. In the past 40 years bird populations have collapsed due to environmental pressures, industrial agricultural practice, industry itself, and as such much of the sonic scenography of the seasons has faded. Alongside this traditional relations to the land are forced to adapt, identities rooted in place disrupted, need to re-orient towards a changing world. The Pro Casile Chiocclo competition, is an over 800 year old bird call imitation competition in Northern Italy. In collaboration with the competition Sol and Giula have proposed a new category for the ancient craft, of performing the calls of endangered birds. Together with the community they are creating an embodied archive of disappearing migratory bird calls, to be passed down in the competition community, and registered in a film work, an embodied archive of both an ancient disappearing culture, and the birds themselves, by their songs, as they disappear.

Sol is a Netherlands based artist working through collaboration with professional and non-professional groups, considering the encounter as a space of production. Frequently working with video, sol is focussed on ways individuals and communities constitute themselves through their association with collective cultural activity, and how identities and histories entwine through the performance of cultural attachment.

Giulia is an artist from North East Italy who is largely focussed on language, how tropes, metaphors, cultural heritage and linguistic misunderstandings shape the way we interact, and in language as a set of architectural and theatrical mechanisms. She experiments with how language can be inhabited, bent, and transformed. Across choral performance, radio pieces, installations and stage sets, she engages performers and public in synchronicity, polyphony and the overlapping of voices.