The Conference of the Birds (in the 21st Century)

Noemi Calzavara & Marlotte Nugteren / Klasse Pirici

30 May 26

Odeonsplatz / Sendlinger-Tor-Platz

In the heart of Munich, this intervention aims to redirect the urban gaze. Bodies transform into human architectures honoring the hidden courage within collective movement.

The intervention transforms the human form into a modular architecture of branches, wings, and blossoming flora as the participants gather to embody a living sculpture. By honoring the “microscopic courage” hidden behind organic elegance, the intervention unfolds through a practice of “becoming”. A suspended moment of hatching where intertwined hands transition from a protective enclosure into the collective motion of flight, as to to view belonging not as a static state, but as a rhythmic dialogue between safety and liberation.

This act serves as a social reflection on how we can simultaneously be a “place” for others and an “action” within ourselves. The title is an intentional reference to the 12th-century Persian poem by Farid ud-Din Attar; just as the birds in the poem discover that the leadership they seek is their own empowered collective, this work mirrors that strength back to the people. It stands as a hymn to the everyday and an invitation to look up, finding refuge in the boundless space above the urban noise.

Noemi Calzavara, born in 1998 in Milan, Italy, lives and works in Milan, Munich and Berlin.

Marlotte Nugteren, born in 1994 in Zwijndrecht, The Netherlands, lives and works in Rotterdam.

Within Public Art München Focus Year and its generous, overall focus on how we communicate and interact with our surroundings, rediscovering the public space as a place of multiple possibilities, the framework of the Invisible City proposes a further deepening of these core concerns. Five young artists – Noemi Calzavara & Marlotte Nugteren, Geumok Oh, Lee Kern, Mariateresa Molino, Carla Vollmers, all part of or having graduated from the Performance class at the Academy of Fine Arts, show individual performative works in the context curated by Alexandra Pirici (artist and professor for Performance at AdBK Munich). Their works reveal or refocus attention on less visible aspects and dynamics: of the public space and its collective construction, of the social fabric of the city, or even of the city’s natural environment and its psychogeography. Spread across various locations – Marienplatz, transit nodes, the Isar river, children’s playgrounds or monument sites, the performative actions propose interruptions, reconstructions, subtle changes or attunements in relation to places and bodies both material and imagined, both living and object-like, inviting us to consider them anew.