Wind Eater: A toolkit for interruption

JENS HENRICSON

Ongoing during Tiny Park Festival
Location: Tiny Park site, beside OPI Lab, Gröndalsvägen 1

The swift is a species of bird that migrates for winter and returns to its European habitats, including Sweden, during May. They have a place memory, returning each year to the same nesting spots. As birds that rarely land on the ground, but eat and sleep on the wing, returning to discover the destruction or removal of their nesting spots can be disastrous for their reproduction as a species. There is concern about declining trends in the populations of long-distance migratory birds such as the Common swift in Europe. They are currently "red-listed" in Sweden, signifying it as an threatened species.

Jens Henricson's sound installation at the Tiny Park Festival site – a timed playback of the recording of bird calls – is one of several prototypes for a device that might attract swifts to build their nests in proximity to it. If succesful, this attraction could spark off a chain reaction that demands certain responses in terms of care and maintenance. The presence of a “red-listed” species could also make it difficult or impossible for developers to build in that location, inviting us to question the power that citizens’ voices have to complicate development processes versus the power harnessed by instrumentalizing the voice of a threatened species.

 The other prototypes are unobtrusive boxes, one of which is located on the roof of an artists’ studio in Malmö, and the other located is being developed for a building façade in the area under development in Lövholmen. Henricson plans to develop an open-source manual for creating these devices, allowing anyone to replicate it.