A BIG YEAR

The Mozart of ornithology, who knew every voice of the birds in the skies, ultimately fell from the sky himself – not out of hubris, but in a plane that could no longer defy gravity. In her work A BIG YEAR, artist Annika Kahrs engages with the legacy of ornithologist Ted Parker III (1953-1993), whose extraordinary hearing enabled him to identify over 4,000 bird species by their song alone – a talent that left a lasting mark on ornithology and fundamentally changed the way that birds are documented and understood.

Kahrs draws on original recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, including clips of Parker’s own voice – fragile traces of his life devoted to sound, and imbued with a quiet kind of poetics. The space of St. Peter’s church in Lübeck becomes a resonating body in itself – for historical audio material, the voices of performers, the sounds of triangles, and the knowledge of contemporary ornithologists.

The work explores how scientific listening, collective perception, and translation intertwine, and how Parker’s passion for sound is inextricably linked to broader questions of memory, transience, and the ephemerality of the archive.

At the same time, A BIG YEAR considers how humans connect with nature, with the unknown – and perhaps with themselves – through sound, and in particular, through voice as a medium sited between proximity and distance. The title refers to a tradition in birdwatching known as the ‘Big Year,’ in which the goal is to identify, observe, and document as many bird species as possible within a single year. Parker mastered the challenge in 1971 as a high school student, setting a record with 626 species spotted in North America – a race against time, guided by the ear. — Paula Kommoss