Zugunruhe

"There is something magical about it [the flying of birds]. Ghosts fly and the holy spirit floats through the air in the guise of a bird. And everyone dreams about being able to fly. It's a kind of desire, a jealousy." Kasper Bosmans in Darley, 2022.

Is there such a thing as an instinctive yearning for paradise? What does paradise look like? And can you long for a place you have never been? These questions were on Kasper Bosmans' mind when he first visited the Thomaskerk in the Frisian village of Katlijk. The quaint sixteenth-century church, set on a small hill in an open field, radiates the serenity and security one associates with paradise.

In Zugunruhe Bosmans draws a parallel between these philosophical questions and the biological behaviour of birds. He finds inspiration in the book The Wisdom of Birds (2008), in which the ornithologist Tim Birkhead explains bird migrations. In the work, Bosmans equates the birds' innate desire to migrate south with our idea of paradise. An uncharted yet deeply alluring place we want to find (again and again).

Zugunruhe consists of a large marble floor sculpture, originally made for the little church in Katlijk, with an ellipse depicting birds flying south. The cyclical shape symbolises the revolution of the seasons and the eternal search for paradise. The title is a compound of the German words "Zug" [movement, migration] and '"Unruhe" [agitation, turmoil]. In ethology, the term is used to describe the phenomenon of "migratory restlessness", the anxious urge birds feel come migration season, calling them away to greener pastures.