Sylva Bird
In Matthew Battles’s book Tree, ferality becomes a way to reimagine our relationship with the living world. This book inspires Sylva Birds to foreground and animate the birds contained within the Plant archive. Debora Hirsch realizes that these birds are ferals: unlike the plants, they belong to no classification. They appeared algorithmically, unexpectedly and unsolicited. She has chosen to embrace them. She not only accepted their presence, but she favored it, by rarely building a composition without them. [i]
Matthew Battles, in his investigation on the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), explores the reality of plants flourishing beyond human intention, thriving in disturbed, anthropogenic landscapes. He invites us to see them beyond categorizations of wild and domesticated, native and invasive, recognizing ferality not as degeneration but as a potent form of life, an adaptation that occurs without human permission or design. Feral trees embody transformation, proliferating across abandoned lots, highways, and fractured urban spaces, gardens, offering a living testimony to modes of existence outside the frameworks of control and aestheticization.
Birds have long occupied a threshold space between earth and sky, between presence and omen, the tangible and the ineffable. In Roman divination or auspicia, their flights and calls constituted a language of signs, an intricate code through which divine will might be deciphered. Sylva Bird tries to reactivate this ancient sensibility by generating presences that act as vectors of hidden messages. Their forms and movements beckon interpretation, offering the viewer encrypted signals from a world in flux.
Essentially, these birds are presented at human scale. No longer tiny figures inhabiting a distant sky, they stand in direct, corporeal dialogue with the human viewer. Their enlarged presence collapses the distance between species, transforming the encounter from passive observation into a relational field charged with mutual perception. Their scale insists on recognition, establishing a shared space where human and non-human exist in confrontation and entanglement.
Drawing from these insights, Sylva Bird shifts the meditation from the endangered plant species to the feral birds. Rather than being reconstructed endangered species, they are simply unsolicited birds algorithmically generated. They are not restorations of a lost past nor speculative projections of an imagined future. They are presences unto themselves, unclassifiable, inhabiting the blurred territories between nature and artifice, between memory and invention. Like feral trees, they unsettle the human impulse toward categorization and mastery, embodying instead an ecology of uncertainty, rupture, and continual metamorphosis. Life that resists frames: it leaks, mutates, proliferates beyond taxonomies and archives. Sylva Bird embraces this ungovernability and proposes a different way of being, one that welcomes complexity, acknowledges dissonance, and moves beyond the fantasy of purity. Indeed Sylva Bird shares with Matthew Battles’s book Tree a commitment to rejecting ideals of purity, resisting the allure of simplistic binaries, and inhabiting the dense, generative spaces where life persists in ways both unforeseen and uncontainable. Sylva Bird embraces this ferality as a form of vitality, resisting purity, taxonomy, and control while proposing an ethic of coexistence with hybrid, unpredictable, and indeterminate forms of life.
[i] Matthew Battles, tree, Object Lessons (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
