Glimmers, feathers and staring skies

"Glimmers, feathers and staring skies" explores grief and migration through the hummingbird, weaving personal loss, Costa Rican folk belief, and scientific imagery to question how humans relate to, classify, and care for more-than-human bodies.

"I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night"

Li-Young Lee, “Little Father”

Hummingbirds are the only birds capable of flying backwards; their suspended motion mirrors the process of grief, moving into the past while still held in the present. A few years ago, I left my home country, Costa Rica, finding my own migratory route across the ocean. During that time, my father passed away from a neurodegenerative disease that slowly took his movement and his voice.

When he was well, my father spent his days tending to the flowers in our garden and caring for a hummingbird that visited the red feeder he placed. After his death, my mother told me that the hummingbird continued appearing whenever she walked through the garden.

She explained that, in Costa Rican folk belief, hummingbirds carry the souls of the dead and return to greet those they love; a belief handed down through generations and influenced by the cosmology of the Boruca, an Indigenous community in Costa Rica whose spiritual traditions are entwined with the natural world.

"Glimmers, feathers and staring skies" explores the hummingbird as a migratory body that transgresses dominant knowledge systems, moving between science and myth, between the earthly and the celestial. Engaging with personal archives alongside colonial and ornithological materials, the project interrogates how humans have tried, through images, to capture and classify a fleeting body.

It asks how we attend to and relate to more-than-human others in an age of ecological fragility. It is a practice of care and attention shaped through inter-species relationships, opening alternative ways to experience grief and memory. It becomes a process to reconnect with my father, reimagining his still body through the language of flight.