b for the birds by Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

b for the birds is a singular book that aims to rethink the film-form as an open cartography of its lines of enquiry, desire and fabulation. Its starting point is Common Birds (2019), an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes' play The Birds, written around 2500 years ago, which imagines a radical line of flight from debt. Departing from their experience of preparing and making the film, the artists and filmmakers experiment with different narrative modes to explore the potentialities of withdrawal and worklessness, zombie languages, outlandish oralities, hauntologies of extinction, symbiotic collaborations and the powers of metamorphosis in creating new alliances among endangered species and imagining a space of re-enchantment for fugitive dwellers of a wounded planet.
 
GRAEME THOMSON & SILVIA MAGLIONI are filmmakers, artists and researchers whose work explores the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, the audible and what has been silenced. Focusing on the reactivation of lost, forgotten or silenced archives and histories, their practice includes the creation of films, mixed-media installations, soundworks, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. In dialogue with literature, philosophy, music and science, their work is research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary, proposing new forms of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics.