Glimmers, feathers and staring skies

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 photography has attempted to capture, verify, and classify a fleeting body. In an age of ecological fragility, the project considers how we attend to and relate to more-than-human others. Conceived as a practice of care shaped through interspecies relationships, it opens alternative ways of experiencing grief and memory. In doing so, it becomes a means to reconnect with my father, reimagining his still body through the language of flight.