Hanna Tuulikki on the bird that never flew

'Let Glasgow Flourish' goes the motto on the crest of Scotland’s largest city. Recently, British-Finnish multidisciplinary artist Hanna Tuulikki, who has called Glasgow home for two decades, has been hearing calls from the skies and trees making her wonder how well we’re living up to that maxim. “We cannot flourish on a dead planet,” she says.

The iconography of the city’s seal, and the religious myth of the miracles performed by its patron saint, St Mungo – specifically his alleged resurrection of a dead robin – provide the foundations for Tuulikki’s newest multimedia work, the bird that never flew. It’s the latest in her exploration of what she calls the “more than human”, a Ghibli-esque engagement with – and, in some cases, embodying of – the natural world to show what humanity can learn from animal communication and behaviour. “I want to find a space of relation, of continuum, rather than of othering,” she says.

After last year’s Echo in the Dark, a rave based on bat echolocation techniques, this new work of performance and sound art is the result of Tuulikki’s obsession with birds, their ability for cross-species communication, their hyperawareness to danger, their declining numbers and the devastation of their ecosystems. Tuulikki speculates: what if birds are signalling to our species the horror of ecological destruction?

“Imagine sitting in your garden, listening to the birds in the trees, and your neighbour's cat comes along, and suddenly there's a robin which starts to sound an alarm call,” she explains. “And then a blackbird follows, causing a ripple of recognition through the nearby bird species. That initial single call can save a whole community. It's a form of altruistic behaviour which challenges Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, this evolutionary idea underpinning the core of capitalist ideology.”

Tuulikki says she related that response to protest culture – an action instigated by a desire, and hope, for change. That opened a door to an “arboreal imaginary space”, as she puts it, where the UK’s endangered red list birds – the mistle thrush with its “rattling tone”, the capercaillie, the wood warbler, the nightingale, Tuulikki throws around ornithological knowledge like it's her key discipline – create a cacophony of warning. “The population of greenfinch have been decimated since 2005. When you translate its alarm call into these extreme glissando notes, it literally sounds like a siren,” she says.

Hanna Tuulikki. Photo: Laurence Winram

This will manifest as a live musical piece and immersive performance experience. Sonically, the composition borrows from drone and ambient music, with choral singing thanks to Tuulikki’s collaboration with vocalists Mischa Macpherson and Lucy Duncombe. Of course, the main element is pitch and tempo shifted bird alarm calls – Tuulikki will slow down the dawn chorus she recorded in and around the Glasgow Necropolis and Cathedral where the show will take place as audience members enter for the performance, signalling a step into “bird time” – as well as vocal manipulation, reverberation and translation of those calls. In the piece, the use of the bird calls is quite striking: field recordings of birds are commonplace in experimental music, usually to create a restorative atmosphere, to the point of being rote. In the bird that never flew, their presence fosters an environment of extreme anxiety and urgency.

Tuulikki was entranced by the musicality of these bird calls and, taking their lead, wrote and demoed a three-part polyphony of different melodic lines. She was also influenced by plainchant and the works of medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen. The result is a piece that acts as a sacred lament for our crumbling environment, apt considering it will be staged in a historically spiritually significant building where communities of birds perch and likely nest in its eaves. 

Taking secular ideas into holy spaces is in line with Tuulikki’s inquiries into “our winged kin”. It’s “a really interesting provocation” she says, even if she wouldn’t have thought of it had Historic Environment Scotland not invited her to make something for one of their buildings. “The story of St Mungo, which underpins the formation of our city, is so interesting in relation to biodiversity loss,” Tuulikki goes on. “It's a radical story in the Christian tradition because Christianity has placed humans at the centre of everything for so long. And it raises questions about what bodies are mournable. It's all in there, it just depends what we focus on as a culture. And I am interested in poking at that.”

She pulls out a book by Vinciane Despret – Living as a Bird – a philosophical investigation into how ornithologists have written about bird territory. “She writes beautifully about territorial space as a place of encounter, where multiple ideas can coexist,” Tuulikki explains.

This relates to climate protest too. “No matter how you choose to express your ecological awareness, I think the arts can be a space to feel all the feelings that come up with it: grief, anger, anxiety. We need to sit with those feelings and acknowledge what's happening in order to create radical paradigm shifts.”

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the bird that never flew takes place at Glasgow Cathedral, 8 & 9 Sep
hannatuulikki.org