Little chick, where will you fly? | Milly Barzellai
Curator: Sofie Berzon MacKie
There was a massive explosion just before we arrived, and now a mushroom cloud is rising. Its origin is unknown. Although mushroom clouds gained their reputation in a nuclear context, a volcano could also produce one. Whether it is natural or man-made, we do not know, but the cloud is here, and a catastrophe is about to unfold in a colorful, soft world made of light and vibrant clay.
Despite the gravity of the evolving situation, an ostrich and a hippopotamus sit wide-eyed and mesmerized, their expressions conveying a trance of excitement. Their limbs are spread out joyfully—they’ve won front-row tickets to a magnificent, spectacular show. Of all the ways to respond to such an event, this one seems reasonable, especially for those who have never seen a mushroom cloud before.
An apocalyptic event, assembles scene after scene. The next thing happens, perhaps alongside the huge broccoli-shaped cloud (if the world has decided to come crashing down all at once). Fireballs begin to rain down on the earth that Barzellai brought to life in the Gallery. Falling stars accompany a meteor shower. They are colorful, delicate, and beautiful. A wolf gazes at the dark night sky, now painted pink and pale blue; a small explosion glows on the horizon. The only real difference between the beauty presented by a strip of light glistening in the evening sky and that of a fire posed to bring everything smashing down on us is the relative scale of what’s coming.
Meanwhile, in the sea that borders the wolf’s forest, the hippo, and the ostrich, a coral reef has lost its color in a bleaching event. On the sea’s surface above, a sizeable
wave of colorful water is about to crash over the many animals. Its frozen, dough-like consistency is strikingly reminiscent of ice cream. A giraffe stands too close to a Chantilly tornado, and although you might imagine a cheerful soundtrack in the background, the situation worsens by the minute. A giant crack has opened in the vivid ground, and a chain of mythological-scale events is developing. The world, once woven as a stable system of fine, intricate reciprocal relationships, is slowly collapsing on the animal heads. As masterpieces of their species, correlating while precisely balanced with the world from which they emerged and in which they developed, they now find themselves in a bizarre situation. No muscle mass, long neck, or sharp claws can help now.
The vulnerability of the animals facing the size of the rift, which we partly know that humans brought to their doorstep, is apparent. The world is gradually losing its vibrant music, veering toward an end that feels inevitable. The cascade of events has crossed the point of no return, and the once-happy, blooming green field now leads toward a barren, thorny patch of land. The green has charred, the trees are black, and the ground smolders. A chicken and a small chick stand bewildered amid the ending.
Little chick, where will you fly? A view from above reveals glimmering dots of color embedded whole in the scorched earth. A flock of colorful birds lifts off from the burnt forest; their shiny feathers will carry them elsewhere to a place untouched by all this. There are probably whole places that are still untouched, where they might land on a blossoming tree and hear the sea waves woosh.
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Barzellai has been working on his allegorical installation for three years. It has evolved further since October 2023, when he left for Portugal, where he still resides, aspiring to find and create reserved spaces that allow for an essential and creative life in a world shrinking around him. The children’s soft and pliable clay, used to sculpt molten lava, tsunami, and fire, became, in Portugal, small, multicolored figurines of birds he encountered during his travels.
“Little chick, where will you fly?” tells the story of wandering and listening to one’s inner compass, which leads to places that enable human freedom, imagination, play, and creation and offers personal liberation from the tyranny of a broken world.
