Song of a Bird (S.O.A.B.) is an ongoing investigation into namra, bird song, embodied memory, and the cultural knowledge surrounding Maltese bird-trapping. To date, it has taken the form of live performance, an audio-visual installation, recordings, interviews, images, and a continuing contribution to a repository of cultural practice.
The work began with my father’s ability to mimic bird songs. He belongs to a community of bird trappers in Malta and Gozo. I started following him with a camera and gradually accumulated a micro-archive through extended interviews, recordings, observations, and encounters with other trappers.
Each spring and autumn, during the birds’ migratory seasons, the namra takes hold of around 4,000 Maltese trappers who long to sit in nature at dawn, waiting for songbirds. Namra is a Maltese word best described as “a lifelong passion”; “a folly that appears all but incomprehensible to the casual observer”. Namra is believed to be inherited.
This research is not an argument for trapping. It is an attempt to stay with a disappearing and contested form of knowledge: the sounds, gestures, technologies, desires, memories, and intergenerational bonds that gather around the practice. I try to identify situations in which this community can share its embodied memories through performance, listening, and acts of transmission.
Manifestations
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Nassaba: Song of a Bird
A live documentary performance developed from the S.O.A.B. research, following my father and other Maltese bird-trappers through video, song, memory, field recordings, and performance.
S.O.A.B.: The Choir
A stereo audio-visual installation in which Maltese bird-trappers perform the calls and songs of migratory songbirds.
Archive note
This page is being rebuilt as part of my living archive. Older images, field recordings, footage, interviews, and related fragments will gradually be gathered here or linked from here as they are reviewed.