I would sit for hours, watching them glide across the horizon: ocean and sky divided only by the dark rhythm of their flight. Let me try to count them, I thought. An impossible task.
The series is dominated by monochrome lines, finger-painted tally marks, and scribbled cormorant notations. Discarded anchovy nets are stitched with copper wire, overlaying grey areas – both literally and metaphorically.
Only later did I discover the Cape Cormorant is now classified as Endangered.
Its population has dropped by more than half in three decades.
This series is about more than endangered birds. It opens questions about what – and who – we choose to care about. Why some species are more protected or mourned, while others, less visible or charismatic, slip away unnoticed. It also reflects on the impact of industrial fishing, the precarity of small-scale fishermen, food security – and the vast entanglement of the human-environmental dilemma.
For me, in the end, the birds became a cipher for something much larger:
An ecosystem of contradictions.
Seen and unseen.
Counted and unaccountable.
A never-ending end.
