Curated by Kirsty Badenoch. Microscope is a non-profit testing space for arts and ecology, curated by Kirsty Badenoch and Daniel Rea, and supported by Periscope.
What is the role of Love in an age of Climate Breakdown?
Parliament of Birds transforms Microscope into a “talking shop” to gather tales of human love for our fine feathered friends. Participants are invited to don a mask of their choice and approach the globe to declare their ecological love. The installation takes heed from Chaucer’s 14th century poem, “Parlement of Foules”. In the poem, Mother Nature brings together birds from different factions - birds of prey, worm eaters, seed eaters and water fowl - to choose their mates. Parlement of Foules established the association between St Valentine’s Day and romantic love. Taking place halfway between February Fourteenths’ 2026 and 2027, Parliament of Birds invites a reconsideration of love as an ecological act - creating space to declare solidarity for the more-than-human.
We all engage with birds every day. We blow kisses to Magpies (the jangling pye) , associate lost loved ones with Robins (the tame ruddock) , and celebrate summer’s beginning with the sight of Swallows (The swalow, mordrer of the flyes) . Indeed, the UK has more members for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) than any political party. Parliament of Birds translates this avian fervor as a collective form of love - distinct from the romance of Valentines Day. The show is a small step towards understanding ecological love as a phenomena to re-enchant our connection with ecologies.
33 masks have been created for the show, each depicting the birds from Chaucer’s Poem. Each mask is composed of surplus archival maps - birds-eye imagery - sourced from the Royal Geographical Society. Maps have been chosen to correspond to where the bird in question hails from.
The Bird's global migration routes are laid out on the “Dispatch Globe”, around which the birds circle.
Parliamentary procedures are oppositional, fundamentally in tension with the entwined and mutualistic nature of ecology. Just as with governing parliaments, the masks belie the contradiction of representation - to look-like a bird is not the same as feeling-like or sympathising-with a bird. Similarly, the globe and the maps used to craft the masks are unreliable narrators of the true complexity of the lands they depict.
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to don a bird mask, to embody this other being, and approach the globe to address the Parliament. Two birds enter dialogue from the antipodean ends. What do these birds represent to you, and what do you want them to know? What would you like to communicate to our avian kin? Throughout the show the procedures of the parliament were sound-recorded, to be later performed to the birds in the wild.
