Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen Hummingbird Guided Meditation

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Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen, “Hummingbird Guided Meditation,” 2024

still (courtesy of the Gallery)

The first of a two-part journey representing one year in the life of a hummingbird as she migrates between Mexico and Canada, this footage was captured on Super8 film in an overgrown garden in Querétaro and then digitally slowed to embody the bird’s vastly different time signature and perception. Based on an inter-species empathic exchange with a migrating creature who does not recognize national borders but is affected by them, its seven scenes allude to the hummingbird’s occult exploitation in the crafting of love-binding spells, the worker-ants she feeds on, and the worker-humans that decimate her nesting grounds.

The accompanying soundtrack was composed from field recordings on cassette tape. Recorded over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path over North America, sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, impulsive fireworks, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Physically looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the fluttering, murky electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.