Dear Volker: a human-sparrow epistolary about expression, desire, and thresholds of relation

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Bisshop, Ally
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2023
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Abstract

Last summer, the chubby, noisily social hordes of sparrows that take up annual nomadic residence on our balcony were displaced by one lonely and territorial male. We named him Volker—because it’s a German name and we live in Berlin, but also because of its resonances between ‘vocal’ and ‘volk’ (people): the communities of passerines that Volker spent each day loudly signalling, and whose bodies and songs happily plaited the branches of the trees below. We—who watched him, curiously, from the blandness of our locked-down living room—could not determine whether Volker was actively summoning his sparrow kin, or warning them away. As Volker’s loneliness persisted, his agitation grew. His calls became louder, tonally aggressive—at least to our ears; shrieked from the balcony balustrade toward the passerine collectives below. Volker was in distress, we decided. The ritornello he sounded out was too rigid; if his songs enunciated a social territory, then it was surely one walled by thresholds of exclusion. But then, what if Volker was signalling refusal, an incantation of resistance in a performance that also gave him creative agency? What aspects of avian desire and pleasure are missed by speciated and mechanistic readings of their vocal behaviours? This speculative lyric essay thinks, with Volker, about territories and their vocalisations, about avian desire, about refusal and agency, about the limits of the social. It also thinks about the kinds of territories that are drawn between human and animal through a curious, zoephilic attention to their creative ethological expressions.

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Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts

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8

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© 2023 La Trobe University. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.

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Environment and culture

Creative and professional writing

Other creative arts and writing

Art history, theory and criticism

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Bisshop, A, Dear Volker: a human-sparrow epistolary about expression, desire, and thresholds of relation, Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, 2023, (8)

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