BirdScore

(2018)

BirdScore (2018), Glazen Huis, Amstelpark, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Amstelpark, the site of BirdScore, was the 2nd Floriade – World Garden Fair – when it opened in 1972. In BirdScore, Jeroen van Westen and Michael Pestel approach the park, with its extensive global botanical exhibits, as a map of  “collateral damage” done to bird species in the corresponding regions around the world. In other words, we connect extinct birds to the exhibits. Thus, we take the park’s non-native trees and plants as the keepers of avian memory transplanted onto foreign soil. In a sense, the birds are here re-colonized in a final, poignant effort to resuscitate them. Jeroen writes: “For BirdScore we mutated into birds – Michael with his BirdMachine and Jeroen with his BirDrawinGloves…. By raising our level of awareness and pursuing an active approach we can contribute to engineering valuable new ecosystems in urban settings…. Let us then talk like a bird through a beak-shaped flute, and draw like a bird with hands turned into talons.”