a collaboration between Edgar Endress & Chris Rackley.

The project has its origin in botanical, animal, and bird’s illustrations created during the so-called “age of discovery” during the early XV to XVII century. As a consequence of the Enlightenment, the images represent a form of understanding and incorporating the new species of the colonies into the system of knowledge.
The project attempts to recreate a fictional landscape, using an illusory prequel of the Hitchcock’s The Birds as a reference. The movie works as a mechanism of a series of questions about the sense of normality incorporated through reasoning and knowledge, and what happens when that is altered by an undefined hostility, where nature becomes an aggressive entity capable of re-claiming its territory.
The original illustrations were created as a means of scientific dominance over the new colonized landscape and as an inventory and re-affirmation of the sublime relation between the colonial powers and the new natural landscape. The prints use a ludic strategy spirited by the artists of mestizo baroque during the colonial enterprise in the Americas by reorganizing the visual grammar in painting and sculpture primarily imposed by the colonizer to create a new narrative, where questions about dominance and representation are incorporated into the main discourse itself.