As he walks among the endless rows of the collection, Kepanga expresses his shame and sorrow for the animals by directly addressing them in his language as “you ghosts” and himself as “a fellow animal.” The scene is indicative of the different traditions, approaches, and positions of being, sensing, and knowing that are possible (and practiced) in and towards the living world. While a museum specimen of a tropical bird of paradise can enable a certain form of scholarship for generations after that bird’s endemic forest may have been destroyed, Indigenous communities have inherited the skills to care for the intergenerational reproduction of a habitats from their multispecies ancestors. Like many other moments in the film, the scene in the Zootèque is also a reminder that animals—birds—living organisms—are multi-contextual and multi-scalar, nested kin⁵⁷ that require radically multidisciplinary, and increasingly un-disciplined and counter-disciplinary, modes of encounter, response, understanding, and responsibility if we humans seriously want to remediate the old logics of dis-memberment and taxonomical domination that such artifacts as the European bird book and the zoological specimen depot memorialize.

When we think of these other ways of knowing, Kepanga’s remark about the birds’ songs also foregrounds the importance of listening. To listen is to partake in the most essential qualities distinguishing living beings from inorganic things: our inherent interdependence and sociality. Its signi"cance is perhaps summarized most beautifully by Paul Shephard, who writes: “Animals stand forth as actors or the symbols of action, perceived as verbs and bearing consequences in their tissues.”⁵⁸ An epistemological shift towards the active and generative role of relationality and reciprocity allows us to experience the living world as events, constellational and metabolic circumstances, and temporal dimensions. Such perspectives deal with impact, affect, intimacy, and becoming, which I consider as deeply relevant for a curatorial-editorial practice that is geared towards ecological and decolonial work.

By way of a conclusion, a question by environmental philosopher and author of the book Flight Ways, Tom van Dooren, strikes me as inescapable:

What is to be lost and what retained? Which losses will we accept, and in the name of which continuities (and vice versa)? From within a time of colonization and extinction—a time in which so much of this biocultural diversity is being lost, often violently—what does it mean to inherit responsibly, and how might we live up to our inheritances?⁵⁹

Such a responsible inheritance in the context of a new bird book would require that we be attentive to its historical weight of a certain coloniality and matrix of power—and thereby dis-habituate certain ways of seeing and knowing as the normal, given practice. At the same time, it also seems requisite to fill its pages with a madrigal of song, gathering so many wildly different voices that the book would virtually resound in the mind with songs of being-with, mourning, dance, and intraspecies solidarity.