SERIES | Puppet Afterlives
This series of works is centred around a collection of approximately 60 taxidermy, extinct birds in Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden who I have come to consider as imaginary friends. Together, these birds form a microcosm of the global, socio-political conditions that have led to our current climate catastrophe. They have each, in some way, been driven to extinction through capitalist, patriarchal or colonial endeavours. Nests have been trampled by agricultural cattle, parrots have been eaten by colonial prisoners, penguins murdered for fear of being witches, to name but a few.
Through this series, I research and (re)tell these extinction stories through puppetry. By making puppets of this mishmash flock of extinct birds, I am attempting to breathe new life into them. This is something I describe as carving out an afterlife in the poetic imagination. Ultimately, I am driven by the question of what it means to live on in memory?
I am interested in the complexities and problems that arise by attempting to give back life to those we took it from, in the impossibility of telling stories on behalf of those who have lost their voice and the trap of replicating violence in extinction storytelling.
