MURMURATIONS - Sasha Elage in FIGURES Photography Magazine

Murmuration became the name I gave to this body of work. But in truth, it is something I entered more than something I made. These images are just fragments of a larger force I tried to follow with my eyes and heart and camera.

Artist : Sasha Elage

Series : Murmurations

Website / Instagram

This series began in 2020, during the first lockdown in Nice, a time when we were only allowed to leave the house for one hour a day and only within a one-kilometre radius. The world had gone silent. The streets were empty. Something invisible had seized our lives and everything outside the window began to feel distant, untouchable, almost unreal.

But just a few minutes from where I lived, there was a garden. And above that garden, every evening at dusk, thousands of starlings would gather and begin to move. They weren’t flying, they were writing. Carving shapes into the sky. Whispering something sacred that I couldn’t quite understand but needed to see again and again.

This became my only ritual, my only moment of truth in a day otherwise stripped of meaning. I began to photograph them not because I thought it would become a series or a book, but because I couldn’t help it. I climbed walls. I stood on rooftops. I stayed out longer than I was supposed to. Neighbours called the police. But I didn’t care. Something in those birds felt more essential than rules or walls or even safety.

They were not just a spectacle. They were a form of memory. A collective movement that reminded me of something we had all forgotten. Something about freedom, or grace, or the invisible choreography that still exists even when everything else is collapsing.

Murmuration became the name I gave to this body of work. But in truth, it is something I entered more than something I made. These images are just fragments of a larger force I tried to follow with my eyes and heart and camera. They are about listening to what moves in silence. About finding life in the middle of stillness. About remembering that even when the world stops, the sky keeps dancing.

This became my first book. It was released just a few weeks ago and is available on my website. But more than a book, it is a trace. A trace of that strange and beautiful moment when I looked up and felt, despite everything, that something was still alive.