‘Flight into Egypt’ is a multimedia art project combining representations of the Egyptian Goose (Nijlgans) with Dutch Golden Age paintings of the Biblical scene of the ‘Flight into Egypt’.
| The Nijlgans, widely extant in the Netherlands, has recently and controversially been classified as an invasive species in the EU, with rhetorics about its danger and aggression echoing anti-immigrant narratives. Reports urging the species’ culling disregard evidence that its native habitat range has always extended into Europe, and that its presence in the Netherlands is the result of climate change as much as human introduction. |  |
 | The idea that the Netherlands and Egypt (and Europe and the Middle East more generally) have always been interlinked is echoed in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the Biblical scene of the ‘Flight into Egypt’. In these artworks, the Holy Family flees Jerusalem for safety in Egypt. Yet the landscape depicted by Dutch artists is consistently European, thereby imagining the Holy Family as seeking refuge close by, rather than somewhere distant and exotic. The distance between first-century Egypt and the contemporary Netherlands is folded into one, and empathy is extended to those forced to flee home against their will. |
| In my series of paintings and sculptures, I imagine human-Nijlgans hybrids in a style that combines Egyptian and European art, placing them in re-imagined versions of ‘The Flight into Egypt’ by Breughel, Rembrandt, Cuyp and others. These re-imagined histories intertwine human and animal migration, and the ways we understand them in the present. The goose-human hybrids are more than a reference of Ancient Egyptian representations of animal-headed gods; they also represent the deeply intertwined ways in which humans have always shaped the natural world, and vice versa. |  |
