A multi-media immersive sound-art installation, including paintings, sound, video, and found objects. Dimensions variable.

There is a flock of over 3000 Pied Wagtails that nest in the rafters at London Heathrow’s Terminal 5. The location is an ancestral site for the flock, whose biological instinct returns them to their familial breeding ground annually. Even though Heathrow is a space of aviation, and the architects included trees in the original design, the presence of birds in the airport is a safety and mess hazard. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to get rid of the Pied Wagtails, the architects of Terminal 5 took to pruning the trees to make them “un-perchable” (Redgannet, 2019). Of course, the birds continue to return to the site, nesting in the rafters and architectural spaces, causing mayhem for the airport. This extraordinary, almost ridiculous situation feels familiar; humanity locked into a holding pattern of hopelessly trying to control the environment, other people, borders, movement and spaces.

Terminal (2024) is a collaborative, inter-disciplinary, installation that celebrates the Pied Wagtails’ tenacity, and explores emerging concepts about migration, reclaiming spaces, journeying, liminality, repetition, history and ancestry. The paradox of planting bird-free trees, wanting to control that which is beyond human control, notions of birds as harbingers from the afterlife, and the inescapable repetition of past mistakes are evoked by additional meanings of the title ‘Terminal’.

The work comprises several related elements. Paintings of various African birds, and different species of Wagtails appear to be perched in the shadows of trees, which appear to be growing out of suitcases, and are partially person made and partially natural. The use of suitcases has many connotations, referencing journeying, being stuck in transit, waiting, psychological baggage, the Museum and displacement. In the furthest corner, video images of Pied Wagtails and other birds in urban spaces, in dialogue with a sound-art work that includes Announcements from Walter Benjamin’s (1940/ 1990) On the Concept of History. Benjamin reminds us that not only is the history of humanity one of environmental devastation, war, exploitation and oppression; history repeats itself. In 1940 while trying to escape genocide, Benjamin wrote “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” His statement is as true today as it was then. Rather than fix a reading of the work, we are intrigued by the possibilities of meaning, and by exploring the associations that emerge through the interaction of light, sound, moving and still images in the installation.