experimental film
17 min, 4K, 16:9
2025

Larcher’s video Extinction Story examines the relationship between humanity and biodiversity, exploring the delicate boundary of personal experience.
The film unfolds as an intimate and transformative narrative, where personal memory intertwines with a reflection on human impact and our relationship with nature.

At the heart of the work lies an extraordinary collection: around 4.500 eggs of European birds gathered by the artist’s grandfather, Josef Schreiber, beginning in 1899 and ended in 1989 (the first documented fund is from 1936), after bird-egg collecting had already been banned across Europe. This family archive, passed down through generations, becomes the core of a story that investigates the human obsession with possession and the cataloguing of the natural world. Driven by an almost compulsive passion for birds, Larcher’s grandfather sought rare specimens with fervor that was as scientific as it was personal. His research was meticulously documented in diaries, photographs, and other materials that today bear witness to the consequences of human intervention.
The irony of the story lies in the fact that these very documents, born from a relentless pursuit, perhaps also to fill the void left by the loss of a child, ultimately contributed to the fight against extinction, while at the same time being part of the problem.