Floh von Grünigen: Menschen sind einzigartige Vögel

This isn't just a book about birds. This publication is about attention and connection: to nature, to each other, to the moment we might keep scrolling past.

Ten large paintings, fifty bird species, one recurring cast of characters, each appearing twice across two different scenes going about an ordinary day. Look closely and you'll recognize commuters, workers, protesters, lovers, a funeral, a festival – daily life, scene by scene, except every character has the head of a bird.

Musician and painter Floh von Grünigen has spent years watching birds around Bern and folding them into songs, and eventually into paint. Each painting began as a song first: every image on these pages corresponds to a track from his album "Aues & Nüt," so the book can be read, or listened to, or both.

Author Ralf Schlatter closes the book with an afterword that ties the paintings, the songs and the birds together into a single long, breathless sentence about presence: how we drift between screens and elsewhere while the birds, as much as the rest of the living world, are simply here, now, still worth being noticed.

Ralf's German text got a translation by Japanese-born Chitose Maurer-Hayakawa, who lives and works in Bern. Despite a deep-rooted fear of birds, she published her Japanese translation of Swiss-Tibetan author Yangzom Brauen's German-language book Eisenvogel (Ironbird), titled "Tetsu no Tori," in spring 2026. Edited by Choken Son as part of Tokyo-based design studio upcoming.studio, the text circles around to Floh's own interest in learning Japanese, and a trip through Hokkaido in spring 2026 tracing birds shared between Switzerland and Japan.