Eva Davidova's Bird Birth

A red airplane blanket emerges from between the legs of a woman, evoking the pouring forth of blood. Her slow movements, created by merging a sequence of stills, are strange and distorted, but exhibit unmistakably the effort and strain of a woman giving birth. With difficulty, a dead 3D bird is born, and then another, with plastic twisted through their stomachs.

Bird Birth is a visceral dream image of the human role in ecological disaster. In our anthropocene world, animals are often marked by human behavior even before they are born. Collapsing the remoteness between our actions and their outcome, this animation makes a connection of flesh from human cause to animal effect.

Eva Davidova speaks about the transfer of cruelty from an individual decision to one facet in a complex network of decisions. The more complicated the entanglement, the more easily we can deny our personal participation in cruelty—cruelty inflicted on nature, animals, and on other people. Accepting that we are not the makers of reality, but merely those who live in it, makes ideological room for the chaos we wreak upon nature and each other.

Since the start of her project Global Mode in 2015, Davidova has increasingly worked with the mixture of our human bodies with those of animals, and with the deceptive, nebulous body of “data”. Baffled by the depth of recurring monstrosities—and the ways in which they are further propagated by the broken links between our mental positions and our actual behaviors—Davidova is making bonds with 3D animals and mythological characters, pushing to set in motion an action, however (no matter how) absurd.

Birds Birth, 2017 from Eva Davidova on Vimeo.