Explore. Dream. Discover

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By Annalisa Nicastro

Birds know, they know when to depart and when to return. We are all fascinated by that hypnotic dance that flocks perform with their movements in the skies. Each of them is ready for a new and long journey as they float through the imperfect clouds, joined together with others in the flight of life. Their migration is a phenomenon that has been going on for thousands of years, necessary for their very survival. They take to the air following a primal instinct, it is a path theirs that hides secrets unknown to humans and knows how to orient them in the journey they take.
Birds tell us stories of freedom, they are a metaphor for the formation of encounters, the survival of communities and cultures, in this world of ours that too often runs fast. They fly far, carrying with them a message of hope and leaving their traces of exploration, of dreaming. Mark Twain's words echo in their wings, "Cast off the peaks. Move away from the safe harbor. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Just as they leave the nest to pursue the call of the air, we too are called to leave behind the safe harbor of our habits, our fears, to take flight into the unknown. No bird flies as soon as it is born, Luis Sepúlveda reminds us. Yet, there comes a moment when the desire to fly overcomes the fear of falling. It is that magical moment, the Kairòs of the Greeks, when the instant becomes destiny and the act of daring becomes necessary. To dare is a daring flight, a flying over the boundaries of the known, like a bird following the ancestral call to distant lands. It is a movement toward the new, a surrender to the air, to risk, to dream. But daring is not only a matter of courage it is also an act of knowledge. The poet Horace incited in his Epistles to "sápere aude," to have the courage to know, to know. In a world of invisible boundaries and cages, one must fly with thought, free like the birds who, like artists, defy conventions, cross barriers, break invisible chains, overcome stereotypes.
In 2020 in the Selva di Paliano, the centuries-old trees of the wonderful forest, silent witnesses of ancestral knowledge, were the setting for 24 sound tracks scattered here and there with the sound project the Way of Songs: Birds/Birds. A project that merges nature with human creation. And it took place in the same place where the Birds/Birds symposium between artists, composers, art historians, ornithologists and ethologists curated by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev and Hans Ulrich Obrist took place back in 1996. The sound of French pigeons, English crows, Russian nightingales, the bellbirds of Australia to the birds of the Rome Zoo were interwoven with the songs of woodland birds in a reworking of the project carried out, also by the Zerynthia Association in 2013, for the Nuit Blanche in Paris.
The beauty of nature helps us to see the beauty around us. Here, real birdsong mixes with the sound works of artists, creating a dialogue between reality and its transformation into art. Art, like the flight of birds, is an act of courage and provocation, anticipating what is unseen, challenging convention and inviting us to see the world from a new perspective.
Birds teach us that freedom is not just a right, but a journey, a choice, an act of knowledge and courage. It is the willingness to follow one's instincts, to explore new horizons, to challenge the usual to discover new truths. It is a flight into the unknown, a movement that drives us to dream, to discover, to dare. And in this flight we will find our true essence, light as a feather, vast as the sky. And in this same flight, perhaps, we will find our freedom and vision to share with others.