Hummingbird Guided Meditation

Hummingbird Guided Meditation is a cinematic installation presented as a series of meditations on life from the perspective of a hummingbird.

The film’s seven scenes correlate to moments along the hummingbird’s yearly migratory ellipse. Super8 footage captured in an overgrown garden in Querétaro, Mexico and slowed to embody the hummingbird’s experience of time and space, opens a channel for speculative empathic exchange between species. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.

Hummingbird Guided Meditation’s accompanying soundtrack is composed from field recordings on cassette tape captured over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path. Sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Departing from the entanglements of field recording with New Age music and hobby naturalism, the sound is haunted and ambiguous, rarely resolving. Manually looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the murky, fluttering electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world.

Engaging with its namesake methodology, Hummingbird Guided Meditation both creates and problematizes an interspecies imaginary, implicating us through its bejewelled and intoxicating veil.

The digitized Super8 film by Miruna Drăgan (Associate Professor, Drawing) was previously exhibited on a small monitor without sound at Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2021 and as a single-channel projection with sound by Maggie Tiesenhausen at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro in Mexico in 2022. 

This iteration expands into a multi-channel projected installation with spatialized sound and a hummingbird narrator. The words of the hummingbird were written by Marianne Shaneen and voiced by Paulina Macías.