The legacy: grandfather’s collection of bird’s eggs. 4,500 graceful, fragile works of art created by nature; speckled, elongated, pastel-coloured… An orderly confined enclosure of uniform boxes houses the preserved cocoons of the stolen, thwarted offspring of birds of prey and non-predatory birds, from Norway to South Africa. With the legacy comes the story of the collector: Josef Schreiber from Vorarlberg, Central Europe – a middle-class, white, male biography of the 20th century in which order was lost, slipped, had to be reimagined, both on the grand scale and on the smallest private level. Claudia Larcher’s extraordinary essay film is an unflustered tale of restlessness. Personal photos, views of collection pieces and small AI-generated miniatures are overlaid by electronic sounds that seem to communicate with the algorithms of the shell patterns, and a spoken line of thought that traces, sorts and keeps together almost 100 years of change with breathtaking clarity.

André Eckardt