ABOUT
UPCOMING
EDITIONS
FROM 6 TO 9
Giulia Zabarella and Sol Archer
April 30th - June 7th
In the town of Sacile, in Northern Italy, the festival Sagra dei Osei, with documented origins dating back to 1273, has long celebrated the region’s deep connection to migratory bird cycles. At its heart lies the practice of chioccolo, an extraordinary skill in which practitioners imitate bird calls with remarkable precision. Originating as a hunting technique, chioccolo has evolved into a cultural performance: a competition of virtuosity, memory, and listening that registers centuries of shared territory between human and non-human life.
Working collaboratively with the chioccolatori, the artists propose a speculative gesture: the imitation of critically endangered and regionally extinct bird calls. Through breath, voice, and embodied memory, performers reconstruct songs no longer heard in the landscape, producing a living archive held not in recordings, but in bodies.
Zabarella and Archer describe Tawny Pipit as an archive of disappearance, a registration of a dual extinction: of species, and of the cultural forms that evolved in relation to them. Today, both the birds and the traditions that respond to them are vanishing. At once lament and celebration, the work stages a fragile continuity, where imitation becomes a form of craft and care.
The title refers to the Tawny Pipit, whose call, itself absent in the work, is considered insufficiently virtuosic by bird-calling traditionalists. In foregrounding this unspectacular sound, the artists shift attention toward what is dismissed within systems of value. The “insufficient” call becomes a carrier of meaning: a trace of life at the edge of disappearance.
For generations, seasonal change across Europe has been experienced not only through weather or light, but through sound: the arrival of swallows announcing spring, the murmuring of doves, the restless passage of geese marking autumn. These sonic signals once structured the rhythms of everyday life. Today, however, the great migratory populations that carried these sounds across continents have collapsed with alarming speed. Over the past decades, hundreds of millions of birds have disappeared across Europe. What remains is not only ecological loss, but the erosion of a sensory world: a thinning of the sonic fabric through which seasons were once known and felt. Climate change, industrial agriculture, pesticides, pollution, wetland destruction, and habitat loss have silenced many once-familiar voices of the landscape.
Alongside this ecological collapse, the cultural practices rooted in close relationships with birds are also disappearing. What was once part of everyday life becomes heritage; what was once lived becomes performed; what was once shared becomes archived.
In a moment marked by global instability, displacement, and war, the absence of birds acquires another register. When birds abandon a place, or cease to exist, something fundamental has already shifted. Song withdraws where danger settles. The sky empties. Orientation falters. What remains is exposure, and a deepening silence.
Jéssica Varrichio
April, 2026
April, 2026