Theater of Mutual Operations
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Theater of Mutual Operations
The University of Birds, 2020–2021
Multimedia installation / immersive performance
Courtesy of the artists
Composers: Alexey Nadzharov, Alexey Syumak
Performers: Olga Vlasova and Natalia Sokolovskaya Lighting
Designer: Elena Perelman
The University of Birds was first staged as an immersive performance-travelogue in Moscow’s Boyar Chambers in the fall of 2020, where it blended so organically with the venue’s ancient architecture of brick arches and vaults that transferring it to Garage seemed almost impossible. However, like many universities it has successfully “sprouted” a new branch, which is exhibited here as an interactive installation. The route through the University installation begins at the dead-end staircase in Garage Café, where a gallery of hagiographic bird “icons” is located. Visitors can then go up to a secret space on the mezzanine floor, where there are “eaves” with talking and chirping birdhouses, and on into a classroom (the performance will take place in other Museum spaces).
The impulse for Theater of Mutual Operations’ new project was the lockdown in spring 2020, when the world slowed down so radically that many people discovered new “abilities,” such as the daily observation of the arrival of spring or an interest in birdwatching. Meditative birdwatching fits perfectly into the eco-critical reassessment of our relationship with other species, while the proposed study of bird language brings to mind the “speechcreator” (rechetvorets) Velimir Khlebnikov, whose father was an ornithologist, as was the French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose works featuring birdsong motifs informed the musical minimalism of The University of Birds. For the authors of the installation and performance, bird languages are an analogue of angelic languages, which lie beyond our comprehension.
While embodying flight and freedom and acting as a metaphor for peace and the spirit, birds are also considered to be more primitive creatures than mammals or even pests. The marginal scenes of the abovementioned “icons” portray the life and death of extinct bird species such as the dodo, exterminated in the seventeenth century. The classroom tables feature infographics with various facts from bird history. The bird transliteration lesson, the story of the sparrow “genocide” in China, and the pantheon of extinct species act as a metaphorical reflection of the human world, with its xenophobia and intolerance, colonial trauma, issues of minority rights, and environmental threats. These subjects also reference a new type of knowledge, empathetic and intuitive, which could possibly change us by achieving understanding through a metalanguage and help build a better world. Such “situated knowledges,” to use feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s term, involve the rejection of a neutral view from above and the choice of a modest witness position instead, which avoids representation but requires ethical and political responsibility.
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The performance will take place within the installation. Please check the schedule at the information desk or on the Events page at garagemca.org.