Tziih-tzih-tzi-tzi-tzi-tzi-tz-tz-ziiiiuuüüi / último canto
Tziih-tzih-tzi-tzi-tzi-tzi-tz-tz-ziiiiuuüüi is based on situated research into the Tschudi collection of the Natural History Museum of Neuchâtel. The artist aimed to reinterpret the diorama; a format of landscape presentation typical for natural history museums, but instead of painting a realistic landscape, Ivana de Vivanco created a different context for the little bird (Frutera verdinegra, a species collected by Johann Jakob von Tschudi in Peru in the 1840s), that lies at the center of this work.
The altar installation seeks to reconcile two worlds that do not often meet; natural sciences and rituals. Through a speculative exercise, the triptych narrates a fiction in which the animals of the MHNN collection, especially the birds (which represent the largest number of specimens from Tschudi’s legacy), rebel and band together to reclaim the ‘sacred feather’. At a certain point in human history, western natural scientists ‘stole the feather from the birds’ – taken from nature in order to describe ‘nature’. The artist fantasized about the animals taking up their feathers and becoming the ones who rewrite their own history, in which Tschudi and his assistant lose their power over them.
The bird held at the museum since almost 180 years is presented in an unusual form: The artist made a little bed where the beloved Frutera verdinegra can rest, with offerings all around in the form of lime blossom and small seeds for the birds. Limewood is a European wood, known to foster good sleep, which the artist deliberately chose from European plant knowledge as a form of repair towards this Peruvian animal. What if European knowledge wasn’t used for the destruction of the ‘other’, but for dialog, enrichment and potential healing?
In the ‘art of hunting’ there are strict rules: the main hunter has the right to kill large animals that become trophies, whereas the assistant may only hunt smaller animals. In choosing a little bird, this ‘primitive’ masculine logic is dismantled. To counter this logic, the artist made a huge, ‘out of proportion’ altar for such a small, but important animal.
No one has cried her death yet and now it is high time to do so!
