and everything becomes nothing again

/ 2015-2016

515 photographs / artist book, 24 copies published

In 2014, the Latvian fund of nature and the Estonian ornithological society joined forces to set up the Eagles cross border project. At the border of the two countries (Estonia and Latvia) the researchers installed a webcam which observes an osprey nest 24 hours a day. The first goal was scientific, but the project quickly experienced unprecedented enthusiasm among individuals. For the first time it was possible to follow, from an internal point of view, the life of a pair of wild birds of prey, from nesting to the flight of the young.
What Léa Habourdin did.
For several months she followed this nest, a theater of infra-ordinary events where the protagonists, who had become actors in their own lives, never ceased to fascinate her. This adventure resulted in a corpus of 515 screen photographs, the grain of which recalls that of video surveillance cameras, simply retracing four months of the life of these birds.

BORDER CROSSER

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) – rare bird of prey with unique morphology, only member of the Pandionidae sub-order; genus name refers to the mythical Greek king Pandion, whose daughters and son-in- law were transformed into fowl (Ovid, Metamorphoses). We are all animals, they became birds.

Deep in the Baltic woods the stage is set for an ancient play. The narrative is written by nature itself: the arrival of life on this planet, the nurturing, protecting and caring for our young until they spread their wings to repeat the circle of birth, copulation and death once again. “and everything becomes nothing again“ follows the breeding cycle of an osprey couple from hatching until the two fledglings leave the nest. The raptors, with their dramatic colouration and the piercing eye of a hunter, make emphatic protagonists who act out their personal drama in the arena of their eyrie, through light and dark, sunshine and rain, in movement and stillness. We are silent witnesses, unseen and unnoticed. A marvelling audience of an eternal epos, repeated a thousand times, outside of time, outside of space.
(…)

Katharina Günther