Jorge Satorre

Emic Etic?

In 1872, a German scientist, Sir Julius von Haast, found the fossilized remains of a giant bird in New Zealand, that was soon connected to the Maori legend of the Hokioi. The Maori folklore recounts the story of an eagle of immense proportions that was said to be capable of devouring human beings. The bones uncovered by the scientist included a femur, one rib, and two claws. That finding turned a ‘myth’ into a ‘scientific fact’. More recently, it was discovered that Haast’s eagle evolved from The Little Eagle of Australia over hundreds of thousands of years to become approximately fifteen times larger than its original size.

This discovery is the starting point for Jorge Satorre’s work Emic Etic?. The title of Satorre’s project is based on the principle of methodological difference between records. Referencing the natural science museum tradition of making replicas of species in their collections, Satorre produced scale models of the evolutionary process of the eagle fossil discovered by Haast. The artist reproduced the evolutionary process of the Haast eagle in reverse by embracing the characteristics of clay, which reduces in size by 15% when fired. In order to achieve this, Satorre cast and fired replicas of the four original bones from the Haast eagle several times over until they became the size of the bones of the Little Eagle of Australia. The process-oriented work considers how Westernized methodologies of discovery and science intersect with cultural mythologies; how the scientific and the supernatural don’t always necessarily discount one another.