Elisa Caldana, born in 1986, is an Italian artist working primarily with sculpture, performance, film and writing. She graduated from Städelschule Frankfurt, and the University of Venice, and has shown internationally at The Hague, Amsterdam, Rome, Bologna, Turin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo and Frankfurt-am-Main. She is an alumna of Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and recipient of the Mondrian Fund. The Falcon of Karachi, comprising a video projection and a soundscape, was produced with Luisa Puterman (composer) and Zeerak Ahmed (vocalist) in collaboration with Vasl Artists’ Association in Karachi – where she had been an artist-in-residence (2024).
The video piece ‘explores the identity of Laggar Falcon’, taken captive in Malir, tied to a charpoy. The audio piece originated ‘as an attempt at imagining a sound identity for the bird…without words.’
Falconry is one of the oldest known human activities, dating back millennia to before the existence of written history. Whether it is practiced for survival, for sport, or for a way of honoring the past, it continues to evolve unabated. Over centuries, this practice spread outward from the Middle East along the Silk Route, and evolved from sustenance hunting into royal recreation – the ‘sport of kings.’ Falcons are threatened by a dangerous combination of habitat loss, increasing scarcity of prey, and other factors from changing land use and deforestation to climate change. One has to connect with and understand the environment to understand the natural capabilities of the falcon.
A conversation with an animal begins by watching gestures and reading facial cues. It is a non-verbal conversation. You do not think a falcon; you try to feel it. Such is the invocation in Elisa Caldana’s video art. She creates a climate of trust that opens the way for spontaneous interaction with the captive falcon. You cannot chart its course, dictate its wanderings, direct its gestures or choreograph its flight.
Our perception of nature is often human-centric; Caldana is looking at the world through the eye of the falcon when the falcon, blindfolded in a leather hood, cannot see. Some are illegally taken or captured from the wild each year for use in falconry, in which people train the raptors to help them hunt or as a decoy. They are a vulnerable species, facing a challenge it cannot flee. The sport has doomed it to exploitation. The sound piece, like a whale song, is the last wild voice calling to the consciousness of terminally civilized humanity, our last contact with nature before we submerge forever in our own manufacture and lose forever the final fragments of our wild selves.
