On a bare rock by the ocean you will never hear anything but birds whose cries blend with the sound of winds

On a bare rock by the ocean you will never hear anything but birds whose cries blend with the sound of winds’ is a tonal work on the construction of ecologies as image practice emergent contemporaneously with traditions of photographic and filmic image making, and the maintenance of colonial spectacle.

In this film work volunteers who maintain a colonial era tropical greenhouse built in the 1860s in a small, northern Dutch village, soundtrack their maintenance labour with vocal
re-creations from the archives of Hercules Florence, Brazilian amateur scientist and ‘isolate inventor of photography’, who, in the 1820s while on expeditions into former Dutch occupied Brazil transcribed Brazilian animal calls as western musical notation, intending to found Zoofonics, a new branch of Zoology.