I have been visiting the Werderinsel in Bremen every day at the same time for the last four months. Wearing a mask that loosely resembles my own face, I would feed the crows peanuts to bribe my way into their good graces. It was a persistent solicitation, on their home turf as it were, as penitent as I could manage. Under the mask, I became an abstraction – an image. I gave up myself and bid the crows to fill in my image’s shadow with whatever they see. And I promised to do the same for them. And give them peanuts. It took weeks before they dared to trust me, though they quickly took note of my face. Now, after all this time, they knew my face well – or rather, my mask-face.

On November 21st, I staged my master thesis - the live performance-video work “Birds Aren’t Real but Neither are You” - where I gave the mask away to a Visitor who had never met the crows before. So long as he too remained on his best behavior, the crows would know his face because they knew my face, and he would in some part inherit the relationship I had built with the crows.

Yet, the creative space between him and the crows remained pregnant with possibility, if both parties felt emboldened to make something of it.

Across a 150-meter-wide lake, an audience attempted to observe the Visitor and the crows’ first meeting through a combination of imperfect techno-human observation tools including binoculars, live audio narration and low-resolution video livestreams. Exploring how the self emerges and refracts when framed in various non-human and human gazes, the work attempted to dwell with the crows’ agency to challenge existing power relations of spectatorship, representation and visibility in our lives if we dare to be framed through their eyes.

Fall 2025