“A Town of the Birds”
Noguchi Rika

There is a small town about an hour drive from my Berlin home where migratory birds flock. They arrive in masses. Storks in the summer and cranes and ducks in the winter.
When I visited this town for the first time, I was utterly awestruck. Cranes enveloped the sky above the fields. One after another, they unceasingly passed overhead.
After making several trips, I began to wonder why these migratory birds congregated only in this particular town. When one traveled a certain distance away, they were nowhere to be seen. Why do these birds choose to gather here? This was the thought that was constantly on my mind.
It was a month after I started frequenting the town, when the number of cranes had decreased considerably, that I finally had an epiphany. It was most likely not the birds that had chosen this town, but rather it was the humans who had decided to build a town in the place where the birds flocked. I looked up at the sky and contemplated about the people who had thought about creating a town in this place.

Translation: Nobuko Aiso (Art Translators Collective)