Catálogo de aves muertas

Elisa, a prominent biologist studying the mysterious phenomenon of the cuvivíes —birds that plunge en masse to their deaths each year in the Ozogoche Lagoons— loses her life in an apparently deliberate car crash. She leaves no explanation for her reasons for her actions. Unable to comprehend what drove her to such a brutal decision, and even less able to accept the loss, her husband, Leónidas, embarks on a journey with their nine-year-old son to camp in Ozogoche, a place Elisa will never visit again. The grief is inconsolable, but perhaps some answers await them there. They are not the only visitors: a number of people have gathered by the lake to witness the beautiful and macabre ritual of the cuvivíes. They all have their reasons, and some have also experienced loss firsthand. In this environment marked by absence, Leónidas wonders if the impulse to end one's life is a purely human act or if, on the contrary, it stems from broader and deeper causes inherent in nature. Years after that episode, Lautaro, Elisa and Leónidas's son, embarks on his own quest to try and piece together the endless puzzle that is his mother's disappearance. This time, he has her with him in a way: a technology company is creating digital avatars of the dead, allowing the living to continue their mourning in the virtual world, indefinitely extending the presence of those who are gone. Suicide always leaves unfinished business, unanswered questions, irreparable fractures. Often, it transforms the identity of those left behind. "Catalog of Dead Birds" delves into the impulse —individual and collective, human and animal— to disappear and into memory as a territory where the cultural, the technological, and the biological converge. Faced with the void and the unfathomable, Ernesto Carrión offers us a warm, poetic, and moving perspective, profoundly human.