Mouth | Piece
An audio performance in collaboration with sound artist Victoria Karlsson
Mouth/Piece is an audio performance inspired by an archaeological find of a 300-year-old skeleton of a young girl, excavated in 1968 in a cave in Poland. The girl was found with a skull of a chaffinch in her mouth. Mouth/Piece retells this story in multiple voices, including birdsong, speculating on ideas surrounding mother tongue, kinship and feminist ecology. What if the girl and the bird were learning to speak each other’s languages? What if they were exchanging knowledge across species? In the context of the ecological crisis we face, Mouth/Piece explores the relationship between the girl and the chaffinch as an example of the kind of biopolitical symbiosis we should perhaps strive for.
Sound design was created in collaboration with Victoria Karlsson, who is a sound artist and researcher, working across sound art and design and performance. In her practice and research, she explores cultural aspects of sound and listening through performance, visual and text scores, writing and sculpture. She is interested in our cultural relationships to sounds, and the intersections between sound, listening, queer theory and affect. As a sound designer, she is interested in exploring how sound can evoke other, sometimes speculative, worlds within the reality we currently inhabit.
Creative team
Mouth | Piece has been created as part of a practice research project, The Finch Girl. The performance, like the writings developed in response to this archaeological find, is multi-vocal, relational and entangled in its form, foregrounding the multitude of connections that hold together interspecies life. The voices of birds intermingle with the spoken and written words of the team of scientists whose detective work uncovered the story of the girl buried with the finches; and the words of ecofeminist thinkers, ornithologists and real-life women whose lives have been profoundly changed by living side by side with birds are spoken in verbatim. I am so grateful to the wonderful people who lent their voices and instruments for this project.
Characters
(in order of appearance)
Chaffinch
Researcher
The Finch Girl
Birdwoman
Scientist
Donna Haraway
Deborah Bird Rose *
Ornithologist
Malgorzata Kot *
Vinciane Despret *
Melina Packer *
Ambika Kamath *
Ursula le Guin
Krzystof Wertz
Tin Whistle & Guitar
Guitar
Chaffinch
Katja Hilevaara
Eva Hilevaara Shilland
Katja Hilevaara
Elliot Hilevaara Shilland
Molly McPhee
Victoria Karlsson
Christopher Heighes
Malgorzata Kot
Telma Marotto
King Lexie
Abhisikta Dasgupta
Abby Sinnott
Krzystof Wertz
Holly Rogers
John McGrath
The first draft of Mouth | Piece was presented at Festival of Joy, an evening of works-in-progress curated by the Chekhov Collective, at Bold Theatre, London, on 6 June 2026.
* The full audio was edited to fit the 30-minute performance slot, and various story layers were cut. In this process we lost a few characters and voices, but we are hoping to keep these in the next iteration.
We would also love your thoughts on this first draft of the performance. We will continue to develop it, and your thoughts and comments would be invaluable. If you have a few minutes to spare, please could you fill in this feedback form. Thank you.
References
Ackerman, Jennifer. The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. Penguin Press, 2020
Despret, Vinciane. Living as a Bird. Translated by Helen Morrison, Polity, 2021
Despret, Vinciane, and Thom Van Dooren. “Evolution. Lessons From Some Cooperative Ravens.” The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, edited by Lynn Turner et al., University of Edinburgh Press, 2018, pp. 160-180
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016
Hershman, Tania. ‘Uncertainty’ in Still Life with Octopus. Rugby. Nine Arches Press. 2022, p.20
Hilevaara, Katja. ‘Girlspeak’. Performing Punctuation, edited by Julieanna Preston and Intellect, 2026
Kamath, Ambika and Melina Packer. Feminism in the Wild: How human biases shape our understanding of animal behaviour. The MIT Press. 2025
Le Guin, Ursula K. Space Crone. Edited by Sarah Shin and So Mayer, Silver Press, 2023
Fabulating as Mothers: The Curious Story of a Girl with A Bird in Her Mouth’ in Maternal Ecologies: Feminist Practices of Motherhood, Land, and Creativity. Edited by Jessie Carson, Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips. TBP by Demeter Press, 2025.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Univeristy of Virginia Press. 2011
Wojenka, Michał, et al. "The Girl with Finches: A Unique Post-Medieval Burial in Tunel Wielki Cave, Southern Poland." Praehistorische Zeitschrift, vol. 96, no. 1, 2021, pp. 286–309
Sounds cited
Chaffinch calls https://www.british-birdsongs.uk/chaffinch/?type=song-669 and various field recordings
Chaffinch facts (spoken by the Ornithologist) https://sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/chaffinch-bird-song
Kylä Vuotti Uutta Kuuta. Finnish folk song, performed by Holly Rogers (tin whistle and acoustic guitars with…). 2026