The Sky Only Welcomes Those with Wings
Bryony Dunne
Dolce
English
Text by Suzanne Walsh, Mouwafak Chourbagui and Daphne Vitali.
Softcover
88 pages
160 x 230 mm
2023
ISBN 9786188493858
Emerging from a body of research into the entanglement of manmade systems and nonhuman life, The Sky Only Welcomes Those with Wings juxtaposes the vantage points of birds and people, exploring humanity’s preoccupation with control, hierarchies and omniscience. The book departs from two film projects filmed across Greece, Egypt and Ireland that take up themes of migration, border ecologies and ornithomancy. Alongside a selection of stills, script excerpts and research images, Dunne presents her own expository footnotes as well as commissioned texts by artist Suzanne Walsh, film critic Mouwafak Chourbagui and curator Daphne Vitali.
Shifting perspectives and temporalities, it oscillates from the telescopic to the panoptic, from the divination practices of the ancient Greek imaginary to the clumsy artifice of the modern nation-state system, from the rooftop pigeon coops of Cairo to the military and ornithological infrastructure of the Mediterranean. Through the thermal infrared cameras of aid workers, miniature camcorders mounted to eagles, birdwatching binoculars, border surveillance apparatuses and satellite tracking imagery, this lithe volume provides insight into how birds see and are seen, in hopes that we might begin to see our own systems for what they are: neither natural nor inevitable, however normal they may appear.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/collections/latest-arrivals/products/the-sky-only-welcomes-those-with-wings-bryony-dunne)
About the Artists
Bryony Dunne is an Irish visual artist and filmmaker whose practice engages with the overlap between documentary film, cinema, photography, and the natural world. She develops research-driven projects that attempt to challenge ingrained anthropocentric and speciesist attitudes by developing imaginative and informative narratives that examines humanity’s problematic yet essential relationship to the natural world, oftentimes using fact-based fictions and hypothetical futures to build these interconnected narratives.
bryonydunne.com
(source: http://bryonydunne.com/about/)
Suzanne Walsh is an artist and writer from Wexford living in Dublin. They work mainly with performance, voice, music, and audio, as well as some video and photography. They use recitation, recordings, vocalisations, acting, and text appropriation to create rituals, invocations, poetic disturbances, guided tours, and performative lectures. These works, along with writing, attempt to create rifts through which new meanings and realities may occur. The non-human world, from the unseen to the animal, is the main concern of the work, as an attempt to re-order structures of value.
suzannewalsh.ie
(source: http://www.suzannewalsh.ie/new-page-1)
About the Publisher
Dolce publications was founded in Athens in 2017 with three main goals in mind: design, produce and distribute artists’ books and publications. Production spans across printed objects, from exhibition catalogues, to posters and collectable independent publications.
dolce.pub
(source: https://dolce.pub/about/)
