Cloudcuckooland is a research project about a group of taxidermy, extinct birds in a collection in Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Leiden. Employing puppetry and costume as a means to bring these birds back to life, this multi-channel video installation brings the audience, momentarily, into imagined worlds the birds may once have inhabited. This works explores a question that has preoccupied the artist for a long time: if an animal has disappeared in a material sense — gone extinct — how can we flesh out an afterlife for them in our poetic imagination? Puppets made with guidance from Kooman’s Poppentheater, supported by Den Haag gemeente. The project is supported by the Deep Futures Research Group, run by the Design Lectorate at KABK.

Georgie Brinkman is an artist and researcher whose work moves in the precarious territory between science fiction and science fact (and the muddy sludge in between), in order to question what it actually means to be human in an age of extinction. Georgie recently graduated from MA Artistic Research at KABK where she was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust.