TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

2020, Installation, soundscape 2 min 50 s and a publication (16 pages, 20 x 29cm)

In the piece Etudes for birds Leena Saarinen studies language, mimicry and interspecies communication. She’s interested in translations and the knowledge that can be gained or lost in the translation process. She’s also interested in the relationship between the original and fabricated imitation.  

One of the starting points of the work is the idea of mimicry as an interspecies pidgin language. For the piece Saarinen has studied bird languages and spectrograms as visualizations of the bird sounds. First she has imitated the bird vocalizations by drawing, then translated the drawings into sounds as spectrograms and finally collected the drawn sounds into a constructed soundscape. She has gathered the drawings into a publication that works as a score for the soundscape. She has also played the drawn sounds for the birds in the Central Park of Helsinki.  

Through mimicry Saarinen tries to understand the point of view of the other; She tries to become someone else to feel empathy for other beings.