Raven minus an eye

YEAR: 2025
MEDIUM: Expanded film performance, 45:00 mins
FUNDING: Stroom Den Haag

Raven minus an eye is a strange creature - part performance, part film, part puppet show, part lecture.

The narrative follows two entwined paths: the tale of the Extinct Bird Collection at Naturalis, and the story of a (real life) raven who lives in the Tower of London named Georgie. The story is multilayered, drawing on disparate sources and references from an Ancient Greek play to a contemporary Yoruban philosopher, from beheadings of English queens to parrots being eaten to death by prisoners.

Through a conscious decision to not explicitly cite sources, thus merging many voices together, this work invites you to linger around the edges and dwell in the complexities of what can be believed, defined, classified or answered.

I enlist and embody Georgie the Raven as a messenger to talk to the birds who now reside in the mythical land of extinction. Once living subjects in the world, they are now dead objects in a collection. How can we see them as subjects again? How do we find the individual in the flock? But what’s an individual without the collective anyway…? And what’s a body without a spirit? Hmm...

This work is recent and a trailer is still in production!

Credits

Light, sound and cinematography: Alex Wight.

Camera for performance: Arianna Cavalensi.

Performed at: Kooman’s Poppentheater.

Supported by: PRO Invest scheme awarded by Stroom Den Haag.

Documentation: Lara Varat.