Whispers in an empty room
Exhibit reclaimes world’s lost languages
Friday, June 10, 20111
The people who live on La Gomera in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa speak a whistled language that allows them to communicate across the ravines and narrow valleys that cross their small, mountainous island. Known as "el silbo" ("the whistle") in Spanish, it is one of many dying or already extinct languages around the world.
In her exhibit on view at Smith College through Aug. 14, artist and Smith alumna Susan Hiller gives the speakers of two dozen languages a hearing. The show, called "The Last Silent Movie," takes place in a dimly lit gallery, which contains a bench facing a large, darkened screen along one wall and 24 small etchings along another. There, a visitor hears a series of men and women speaking unintelligible languages, while a translation of their words appears on the screen simultaneously. The voices come from recordings that Hiller found in a search of library archives around the world.
The exhibit's name recalls the silent movies of the 1920s, when viewers watched pictures with subtitles rather than sound. Here, Hiller has created a show with sound, but no pictures. Aside from the translations, the screen remains blank, focusing our attention squarely on the voices and their long-lost (or nearly lost) languages: Xoleng, Manx, Klallam, Livonian, Jerrais and Wampanoag, to name a few.
The speakers tell stories, sing or speak snippets of conversation or random words. The show begins with a speaker of K'ora, an extinct language from South Africa, who invites us to listen.
"You do not know what nation we are," he says. "Today you will get to know me through my tongue."
It is a haunting invitation. The speaker, like most if not all of the others, is long dead; his language lost. His voice is ephemeral, the only memory of a person and his people.
A speaker of Southern Sami, one of a handful of people who still speak the language in Norway and Sweden, sings of the "children of the sun."
"No one subdues us/ If we keep our golden language and hold our elders' words."
His song, like many of the other recordings, points to the dichotomous nature of language. While each of these sound bites is only a few words, the language they represent suggests a distinct cultural identity, a way of life and a history.
At the same time, the sounds are fleeting, heard and gone, mere whispers in an almost empty room. Language is an essential and powerful part of human society, but it is also mortal. In Hiller's piece, the languages continue to speak to us from beyond the grave.
The people's words
Ironically, civilization has played a part in the loss of these languages. A Ngarrindjeri speaker talks of how the colonists that came to his native Australia tried to stamp out his people's words.
"The white man said we must not teach language to children," he says. The world is a poorer place because of that.
Because the speakers are invisible, we have only their words to see into their world. Hiller does, however, give the sounds visual expression. The etchings look like graphs of sounds, each composed of a black line that chases the words of a language across a white page. The lines are as distinct as the speakers' voices, some wavy, some jagged, some erratic. They are the sound signatures of each culture.
However, even these visible remnants are scant records of a people.
Hiller, a former anthropologist, uses the visitors to her exhibit - the hearers - to revive these long-dead presences. Faced with their translated words, we become the bearers of meaning, the transmitters of culture.
Hiller has reclaimed these words from the grave and given them to us to carry forward.
The museum is located in Northampton at the intersection of Elm Street and Bedford Terrace. Hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is adults, $5; seniors, $4; students, $3; and children age 6 through 12, $2. The museum is also open from 4 to 8 p.m. on the second Friday of each month, when admission is free. Call 585-2760 for information.
For information about Hillyer, visit her website at www.susanhiller.org, where you can hear an example of an endangered language.
Phoebe Mitchell can be reached at pmitchell@gazettenet.com.
