Grounding Wild Imagination

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By Hanna Tuulikki

Hanna Tuulikki’s masterful Away with the Birds is a testament to her close engagement with the ideas of eco-philosopher David Abram. 

In Abrams’ work we find an animistic approach to phenomenology. Phenomenology is the philosophy of how humans, as animals, understand and build knowledge of the world through our bodily experience of it (how we sense the world through touch, sight, vision, hearing, smell, how our bodies move through the world and encounter other bodies etc). Drawing on animism, the spiritual belief that everything is alive, Abrams’ extends the philosophy to phenomenology to the whole of the more-than-human-world. 

In Abrams’ animistic phenomenology understandings of the world are produced through the reciprocity and relationship we establish between the experiential bodies of living entities, be they animal-human, rock-insect or leaf-wind relations, we only fully come into ourselves in our relational experience of earth-others.

Away with the Birds traces the songlines of human and bird relations on the Isle of Canna (Outer-hebrides) through the mimesis of bird calls in traditional gaelic song. Tuulikki weaves extracts of traditional song together to create a new composition that was performed twice in the harbour of the Isle of Canna, with the audience looking out over the Sound of Canna (the sea channel between islands) to the Isle of Rum. The songs are women’s songs, carriers of a matrilineal relationship to the land, telling of the daily life, folklore and mythology of Gaelic women.

Away with the Birds is the result of a long period of research and collaboration, with Tuulikki working closely with the close Folklore Archive at Canna House, and Sound Recordist and Ornithologist Geoff Sample. The process of creating the songs for the score was also created through a collaborative composition process with the group of singers, all of whom have a personal collection to the work. 

Tuulikki’s dedication to her creative vision is visible in the level of detail apparent in the project - from the costumes to the beautifully drawn score to the detailed commentary of each of the songs, making evident the depth of research and story that has nurtured this performance. Throughout the work, Tuulikki combines technological innovation with tradition to create a work that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. 

The legacy of this project is the digital platform, where we, the audience, are given agency to set our own course through the map-score of Away with the Birds, finding our way through the topography of Canna through bird song intertwined with folk song and commentary.....

“Gu-bhi-gi gu-bhi-go 

Gu-bhi-gi gu-bhi-go 

swan’s voice over water”

“This song speaks to a culture, that is tuned in with the natural world—where human beings exist in a reciprocal relationship to the animate landscape, and its characterful bird inhabitants. Taken together, like two sides of a coin, the raven and the swan, black and white, offer contrasting symbols and prophesies. Their pairing reminded me of a remarkable object that [archeologist] Anne Ross describes, originally found in Dunaverney, Ireland—a “flesh-fork, or horse goad, decorated with ravens and swans in the round” thought to be used in acts of divination. This emblematic image, drawn directly from close observation of the birds, survives in place-names and folklore and, surely also lives on in An Eala air Loch Chaluim Chille“

Extract from Birds of Duality, http://score.awaywiththebirds.co.uk/#duality