As well as natural history,
the muséum also facilitates research into the prehistory of human society. The gallerie d'anatomie comparée is filled with a sea of bones, with mammoths and giant elk arranged alongside skeletons of our own ancestors. It is in this context that the artist's video holds sway. The installation is a projection of a woman using the oldest musical instrument known to date; a flute consisting of the carved wing bone of a griffon vulture. The sound produced is the same as that first heard by our
Homo sapiens ancestors roughly 35,000 years ago.
This link between "man and beast" is all the more striking given that the performance is played out in front of a contemporary vulture, today threatened with extinction. The vulture, at ease and possibly indifferent to the sound of its ancestor interlaced with that of our own, drags the prehistory to the present, and confronts us with our continual and long term link with the wild world.
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