Der leere Himmel Teil 4

Part 4 In the fourth part of the project, Valérie Wagner sheds new light on an ancient connection creating twin portraits of humans and birds facing each other. The portrayed person chose a bird to which she/he has a special connection. In double portraits bird and human then meet at eye level. Personal statements complement the staged black-and-white portraits and thematize the human concern about the declining number of birds.
Valérie Wagner portrayed the birds in Ornithological Museums. With the combination of dead (bird) and alive (human), the artist intends to make the imbalance of the current situation perceptible.

In her new photo project Der leere Himmel/empty skies, Valérie Wagner focuses on a highly topical ecological issue: the dramatic disappearance of birds over the last 30 years, which has been recorded parallel to the worldwide extinction of insects. In October 2017, new studies on bird extinction in Europe were published. According to NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), the number of birds in Europe has decreased by 420 million in the last 30 years.
These drastic figures and the noticeable decline in the number of bird species have been an incentive for Valérie Wagner to create an artistic project on this issue that aims to find images of the loss and its consequences. The artist is concerned with what bird extinction means on a physical level: an empty sky, a silent spring and the loss of beauty, biodiversity and quality of life. At the same time, Valérie Wagner focuses on man’s ancient relationship with birds, which is marked by love and worship as well as ignorance and destruction.
Her intention is to show images of disappearance: the transition from abundance to emptiness, from richness to poverty. Valérie Wagner has conceived her current project as a work consisting of 4 series that focus not on the causes but on the consequences for people and the environment.

Empty skies is the artist’s way of drawing attention to the death of birds and of stimulating a debate on fundamental questions concerning man’s relationship to his environment: a continuation of her central artistic concern, which inspired her, along with other projects, to the photo series ZEICHEN in 2008. In the same year, Valérie Wagner was awarded the Ecology Art Prize for this project.