Maggie Morris 5/13/22 Maggie Morris 5/13/22

CORRIERE DELLA SERA / CULTURA: QUANTE LINGUE IN PERICOLO: LENA HERZOG LET METTE IN MOSTRA

Visori e cuffie, per osservare e ascoltare, un’ultima volta. Per immergersi in un’esperienza di ascolto che presto svanirà nel silenzio. Per essere testimoni di un processo di estinzione di massa, quello delle lingue. Ogni due settimane il mondo perde un idioma, ne usiamo circa trenta su settemila esistenti, di cui almeno la metà si perderà entro la fine del secolo, se non prima. Per questo l’artista Lena Herzog ha voluto farci «sentire» quegli ultimi sussurri. Ha realizzato Last Whispers, che arriva per la prima volta in Italia: a Venezia, Ca’ Foscari. Un’installazione in realtà virtuale (alle Zattere) e un progetto site specific (nel cortile centrale dell’ateneo) che sono un monumento alla varietà in pericolo del comunicare umano. Il canto doloroso di un universo che collassa. E perde le sue voci.

Due sedi, due percorsi per capire (e apprezzare) Last Whispers: Immersive Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree, lavoro dell’artista americana di origini russe promosso dall’Unesco e a cura di Silvia Burini, Maria Gatti Racah, Giulia Gelmi, Anastasia Kozachenko-Stravinsky (Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni culturali dell’Università Ca’ Foscari). Punto di partenza: l’incredibile velocità — maggiore di quella dell’estinzione di alcune specie — con cui stiamo perdendo la nostra diversità linguistica. Alle Zattere (fino al 30 luglio; ingresso libero) Lena Herzog ha realizzato una composizione sonora che unisce discorsi, canzoni, incantesimi e canti rituali con suoni e immagini della natura e frequenze provenienti dallo spazio.

Basta prendere posto e indossare visori e cuffie per affrontare un viaggio lungo mezz’ora in cui (con il sostegno della Jim & Marilyn Simons Foundation) Herzog ha selezionato e messo insieme registrazioni provenienti dall’Endangered Languages Documentation Programme della Soas University di Londra (ora conservate alla Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), dalla Smithsonian Institution, dal progetto Rosetta e da oltre una dozzina tra i più grandi archivi linguistici.

Suoni perduti e altri in pericolo (una quarantina da 27 Paesi quelli che si sentono nel video), come l’ecosistema. «Ogni lingua — commenta l’artista — è un mondo, e con il mio team ho voluto riempire il mondo di altri mondi, creare un paesaggio in cui i visitatori possano fare esperienza di lingue sparite o condannate a sparire». Il senso: «Mentre affoghiamo nel rumore delle nostre voci — espressione dei sistemi culturali e linguistici dominanti — siamo circondati da uno sconfinato oceano di silenzio».

Urgenza globale, sociologica, filosofica, estetica, umana, «perché la lingua — continua Herzog — è come pensiamo, è come ci poniamo rispetto alla vita, è il nostro primo atto creativo. Da qui ha inizio tutto. Il fatto che spariscano così tanti atti fondativi diventa un’emergenza». Lo si capisce osservando i grandi pannelli sistemati nel cortile centrale di Ca’ Foscari: centinaia di lingue catalogate in base al loro «stato di salute» e al numero di persone viventi che ancora le parlano (fino al 30 settembre; ingresso libero).

C’è il Susuami, parlato da dieci persone nella Papua Nuova Guinea (catalogazione: «Critically endangered», molto a rischio). C’è il Garrwa degli aborigeni australiani (quaranta parlanti, «Severely endangered»). Il Panobo, estinto in Perù. Il Macuna, del Brasile (32 parlanti: «Vulnerable»). Ci sono anche lingue molto più diffuse, ma pur sempre in pericolo. Come lo Yiddish con tre milioni di persone che lo parlano ma «Definitely endangered». Come l’emiliano-romagnolo, che viene considerato un unico idioma nella classifica Unesco: due milioni di «parlanti».

Tecnologia, coscienza critica, multimedialità, etica. Il progetto di Lena Herzog, che nasce come fotografa e nella sua poetica affronta i temi della ritualità, della perdita, della «dislocazione» con un approccio che unisce scienza e arte, prevede anche una terza tappa, sempre a Venezia: una proiezione audiovisiva del suo lavoro, su grande schermo, sarà presentata nel cortile centrale di Ca’ Foscari come evento principale dell’edizione di «Art Night 2022», che si terrà il 18 giugno.

Estinzioni silenziose e come evitarle. L’Assemblea generale dell’Onu e l’Unesco hanno dichiarato il 2022-2032 «Decennio internazionale delle lingue indigene».

Maggie Morris 4/23/22 Maggie Morris 4/23/22

ARTTRIBUNE: A VENEZIA IL PROGETTO DI LENA HERZOG CONTRO L’ESTINZIONE DELLE LINGUE

SI INTITOLA “LAST WHISPERS” L’AMBIZIOSO PROGETTO CHE LENA HERZOG HA PRESENTATO A VENEZIA DURANTE I GIORNI DI APERTURA DELLA BIENNALE. STRUTTURATA IN DIVERSE FASI, L’OPERA SI AVVALE DELLA REALTÀ VIRTUALE PER APPROFONDIRE UN PROBLEMA MOLTO IMPORTANTE, MA DEL QUALE SI PARLA TROPPO POCO: LA RAPIDA SCOMPARSA DI LINGUE E DIALETTI DI TUTTO IL MONDO. ABBIAMO INTERVISTATO L’ARTISTA

“La lingua è il primo atto creativo di ognuno di noi”. Con queste parole tanto semplici quanto pregne di significato, Lena Herzog (1970) ha svelato al pubblico veneziano il cuore di quello che forse è il suo progetto artistico più ambizioso. Stiamo parlando di Last Whispers: Immersive Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree, un’esposizione impressionante fruibile fino al prossimo 30 settembre presso le affascinanti tese di CFZ Ca’ Foscari Zattere e anche presso la sede principale dell’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia.

Promossa dall’UNESCO, la rassegna approda in Laguna grazie alla cura e al prezioso lavoro di Silvia Burini, Giulia Gelmi, Anastasia Kozachenko-Stravinsky e Maria Gatti Racah del Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali di Ca’ Foscari. Concepita attraverso un percorso espositivo che unisce due diversi spazi dell’ateneo, la rassegna è formata da un memoriale dedicato a tutte quelle lingue in pericolo, o addirittura dichiarate già estinte (si pensi che ogni due settimane il mondo perde una lingua), e da una poetica esperienza in Realtà Virtuale immaginata come un vero e proprio oratorio immersivo. Affrontando un problema così urgente quanto sottovalutato come quello dell’estinzione di massa della lingua, il progetto si configura perfettamente all’interno del Decennio internazionale delle Lingue indigene 2022-2032 voluto dall’Assemblea Generale dell’ONU e dalla stessa UNESCO.

INTERVISTA A LENA HERZOG

Il concept alla base di Last Whispers ruota intorno al problema della sempre più progressiva scomparsa delle lingue nel mondo. Puoi dirci qualcosa sulla genesi di questo progetto?
Il tema centrale è l’estinzione della lingua, e, trattandosi di linguaggio (che è il nostro strumento fondamentale per pensare, per capire, per sentire, vedere ed essere), possiamo dire che si tratta di un progetto filosofico. La genesi di Last Whispers sta avvenendo proprio adesso poiché quando si pensa all’estinzione si pensa alla fine, certo – l’estinzione è la fine –, ma sicuramente si pensa anche all’inizio e a cosa significhi avere una “casa culturale collettiva”. Il modo in cui noi siamo è definito dal modo in cui pensiamo e il modo in cui pensiamo è definito dalle nostre lingue. Un’estinzione di questa proporzione, che è un’estinzione di massa, è quindi un’estinzione di modi di essere all’interno della sfera della comprensione. La sfida per affrontarla è sia culturale che estetica e filosofica. È questa dunque la genesi del progetto, è molto complesso e stratificato ma, allo stesso tempo, anche abbastanza semplice.

E cosa ci dici della collaborazione con l’UNESCO?
Il progetto è presentato dall’UNESCO, che mi ha dato la possibilità di lavorare con l’UNESCO Atlas of the world’s languages in danger. La collaborazione però non è stata solo con l’UNESCO, ho collaborato con tutti gli archivi del mondo. La mia più grande collaborazione è avvenuta con il programma Endangered Languages Archive, della SOAS, University of London, coordinato da Mandana Seyfeddinipur.
Questa che si vede qui è la lista delle lingue dell’UNESCO, un memoriale comprensivo di liste provenienti da tutto il mondo: tanto dalla Library of Congress, negli Stati Uniti, quanto dal gruppo di ricercatori di Mandana, composto per lo più da linguisti esperti del settore. Una delle cose che questi ultimi stanno cercando di capire è, ad esempio, la definizione precisa di concetti come “estinzione” o “pericolo”, perché il problema non è rappresentato solo dal numero di persone che parlano quella lingua ma anche dall’età di ciascuno di loro. Per esempio, se ci trovassimo davanti a una lingua usata da 20mila o 20 milioni di persone, la cui età però è superiore ai 60 anni, la lingua in questione sarebbe criticamente in pericolo poiché non viene parlata da nessun giovane. Vi sono tante categorie che entrano in gioco e anche molte cose che avvengono nel frattempo. Pensiamo alla lingua Ahom, ritenuta estinta dall’UNESCO quando invece noi conosciamo il suo unico custode, Tilshua Mohan. Con la sua approvazione, abbiamo trovato il modo di sostenerlo economicamente e abbiamo trovato anche il modo per assicurarci che stesse bene e al sicuro.

Pensando al nome stesso del progetto, verrebbe da chiederti cosa pensi del silenzio e quando credi che possa diventare pericoloso.
Quando siamo in silenzio, noi persone delle culture dominanti, probabilmente è una buona cosa perché parliamo troppo, ma quando l’ultimo oratore di una lingua perduta smette di parlare o muore, ad andarsene è un mondo intero. Questo è un impoverimento. Mi viene in mente un meraviglioso scrittore e filosofo come John Berger che tanto ha scritto di un certo tipo di silenzio, lo stesso che sto cercando di affrontare io: il silenzio delle persone che non hanno un posto nel mondo, che non hanno più spazio nel mondo. Berger diceva che il silenzio è come una mano tesa, e per me il silenzio di queste lingue è come una mano tesa. Io quella mano voglio afferrarla e vorrei che noi tutti la raggiungessimo.

FOTOGRAFIA E REALTÀ VIRTUALE SECONDO LENA HERZOG

E cosa pensi invece dell’enorme impatto delle immagini all’interno della nostra epoca? Che possa essere uno dei motivi per cui le lingue continuano a sparire?
Questo è un pensiero molto interessante poiché oggi c’è indubbiamente un’enorme sovrapproduzione di immagini. Pensa a me per esempio: nasco come fotografa, ma quando ho iniziato avevo a che fare con negativi di grande formato che maneggiavo nel mio laboratorio personale all’interno della camera oscura. Di solito faccio pochissime foto, che sviluppo con le mie sostanze chimiche e che stampo a modo mio nella camera oscura. Quello che voglio è la disciplina, voglio avere il controllo su ciò che vedo e ciò che sento. Quello che faccio è un prestare davvero molta attenzione e penso che dovrebbe esserci un equilibrio, un’armonia, tra il “come si vede” e il “come si sente”. E questo implica di nuovo attenzione e concentrazione, concentrazione e attenzione.

E poi, dalla fotografia analogica sei passata alla Realtà Virtuale. Come mai hai deciso di realizzare questo progetto proprio in VR?
Ho deciso di usare il medium della Realtà Virtuale perché l’idea lo richiedeva, e l’idea era quella di capire come si affronta l’assenza. Ovviamente, un’assenza si affronta rendendo presente qualcosa, e la Realtà Virtuale lo fa in un modo così vivido che difficilmente si ritrova da altre parti. Così ho deciso di creare un senso sia per la presenza di queste voci che per il mondo realizzando un lavoro fatto non solo di suoni ma anche di immagini. Ho creato dei paesaggi che ho voluto si stagliassero nell’anima e nel cuore di tutti per ospitare questi mondi. Ed è per questo che la Realtà Virtuale ci è sembrata la strada giusta da percorrere. Di fatto, la prima edizione di Last Whispers, quella che ha debuttato al British Museum nel 2016, consisteva solo in un video in una cornice, supportato da un suono spazializzato, non surround, ma con le voci spazializzate: voci di qua, altre voci di là e così via. Avendo spazializzato il suono il tutto era diventato una scultura sonora. Ciò che accadde al British Museum fu che il pubblico non faceva altro che dirmi di voler vedere immagini ovunque. Questo avviene perché il cervello prova a collegare il suono all’immagine dal momento che l’immagine si trovava nella cornice, mentre il suono no. Il suono era ovunque. Per questo motivo i visitatori lo volevano ovunque. In altre parole, volevano sentirsi calati nel mezzo.

E invece con la Realtà Virtuale?

Quello che ho creato in VR esiste sia in quanto Realtà Virtuale sia come proiezione immersiva, completamente immersiva. In questo modo è possibile fruire dell’esperienza proiettando il video in VR nelle stanze, dentro delle sfere o nell’ambiente di un planetario, come in una cupola. Così facendo, quello che si vede nei visori può anche essere proiettato. Ancora una volta lo scopo è quello di affrontare l’idea di rendere l’assenza di quelle presenze così vivida da fartene sentire la mancanza, e ti sembra perfino di averle già conosciute quelle persone, e di viaggiare attraverso paesaggi che ti consentono il raggiungimento di uno stato estetico. Voglio mettere il fruitore in una condizione in cui quelle presenze possa sentirle, in cui possa avvertirle.

In effetti una delle cose più interessanti della Realtà Virtuale è proprio questo contrasto molto forte che si viene a creare fra il concetto di evanescenza e la sensazione di sentirsi all’interno di un qualcosa…

Sì, oltre all’idea stessa, ciò che mi interessava molto era come fare a rendere un’idea piena di vita. Questo è il compito veramente importante. Per esempio, quando faccio fotografia nella camera oscura – perché sono una ragazza analogica –, lo faccio con tecniche che venivano utilizzate agli albori di questa tecnologia, agli inizi della fotografia. Perché mi interessa lavorare in questo modo? Non è per motivi sentimentali. Mi interessa perché quando i fotografi erano agli inizi, ogni cosa era aperta. L’orizzonte era aperto: non conoscevano limiti. E questo si riflette nella tecnologia di quell’epoca, lo si può sentire, lo si può percepire. La Realtà Virtuale è una tecnologia in fasce, è una tecnologia agli inizi. Quindi molti suoi aspetti sono ancora grezzi. E la magia spesso si trova nei margini grezzi, quando le cose non sono ancora sistemate, quando non sono appianate. È allora che si può effettivamente esplorare qualcosa poiché aperto.

Cosa pensi, a questo punto, della fragilità delle nuove tecnologie?
Beh, la fragilità è sempre stata insita nelle nuove tecnologie, adesso è esagerata perché è la nostra stessa fragilità ad apparirci così evidente. E penso che col tempo questa sensazione lo sarà sempre di più. Quindi la tecnologia è un’espressione di noi, del nostro tempo, ma è anche possibile che noi non lasceremo traccia di tutto ciò poiché tutte queste cose digitali un giorno saranno obsolete e all’improvviso guarderemo alle uniche cose che saranno davvero sopravvissute come dipinti e vecchi dagherrotipi. Questa è assolutamente una possibilità. Ma ci sono altre forme artistiche simili, pensiamo alla danza. Nietzsche diceva che tutta l’arte aspira alla musica, ma lui era anche molto affascinato dalla danza che è una forma molto effimera: accade solo in quel momento, anche se viene registrata.

– Valerio Veneruso

"LAST WHISPERS" IS THE AMBITIOUS PROJECT THAT LENA HERZOG PRESENTED IN VENICE DURING THE OPENING DAYS OF THE BIENNALE. STRUCTURED IN DIFFERENT PHASES, THE WORK USES VIRTUAL REALITY TO EXPLORE A VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM, BUT ABOUT WHICH WE TALK TOO LITTLE: THE RAPID DISAPPEARANCE OF LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. WE INTERVIEWED THE ARTIST

“Language is the first creative act of each of us”. With these words as simple as they are full of meaning, Lena Herzog (1970) revealed to the Venetian public the heart of what is perhaps her most ambitious artistic project. We are talking about Last Whispers: Immersive Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree, an impressive exhibition open until next September 30th at the fascinating tese of CFZ Ca 'Foscari Zattere and also at the main headquarters of the Ca' University. Foscari of Venice.

Promoted by UNESCO, the exhibition arrives in the lagoon thanks to the care and precious work of Silvia Burini, Giulia Gelmi, Anastasia Kozachenko-Stravinsky and Maria Gatti Racah of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca 'Foscari. Conceived through an exhibition itinerary that unites two different spaces of the university, the exhibition consists of a memorial dedicated to all those languages in danger, or even declared already extinct (just think that every two weeks the world loses a language), and from a poetic experience in Virtual Reality imagined as a real immersive oratory. Facing such an urgent and underestimated problem as that of the mass extinction of the language, the project fits perfectly within the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032 wanted by the UN General Assembly and by UNESCO itself.

INTERVIEW WITH LENA HERZOG

The concept behind Last Whispers revolves around the problem of the increasingly progressive disappearance of languages in the world. Can you tell us something about the genesis of this project?

The central theme is the extinction of language, and, since it is language (which is our fundamental tool for thinking, for understanding, for feeling, seeing and being), we can say that it is a philosophical project. The genesis of Last Whispers is happening right now because when you think of extinction you think of the end, of course - extinction is the end - but surely you also think of the beginning and what it means to have a "collective cultural home". The way we are is defined by the way we think and the way we think is defined by our languages. An extinction of this proportion, which is a mass extinction, is therefore an extinction of ways of being within the sphere of understanding. The challenge to face it is both cultural and aesthetic and philosophical. This is therefore the genesis of the project, it is very complex and layered but, at the same time, also quite simple.

And what about the collaboration with UNESCO?

The project is presented by UNESCO, which gave me the opportunity to work with the UNESCO Atlas of the world's languages in danger. However, the collaboration was not only with UNESCO, I have collaborated with all the archives in the world. My biggest collaboration has been with the Endangered Languages Archive program, of SOAS, University of London, coordinated by Mandana Seyfeddinipur.

What you see here is the UNESCO list of languages, a memorial that includes lists from all over the world: both from the Library of Congress, in the United States, and from the Mandana research group, made up mostly of expert linguists. of the sector. One of the things that the latter are trying to understand is, for example, the precise definition of concepts such as "extinction" or "danger", because the problem is not represented only by the number of people who speak that language but also by the age of each of them. For example, if we were faced with a language used by 20 thousand or 20 million people, whose age however is over 60, the language in question would be critically endangered because it is not spoken by any young person. There are many categories that come into play and also many things that happen in the meantime. Think of the Ahom language, considered extinct by UNESCO when instead we know its only keeper, Tilshua Mohan. With his approval, we found a way to support him financially and we also found a way to make sure he was safe and well.

Thinking about the name of the project itself, one might wonder what you think about silence and when you think it can become dangerous?

When we are silent, we people of dominant cultures, it is probably a good thing because we talk too much, but when the last speaker of a lost language stops speaking or dies, a whole world leaves. This is an impoverishment. A wonderful writer and philosopher comes to mind like John Berger who wrote so much about a certain type of silence, the same one that I am trying to face: the silence of people who have no place in the world, who no longer have space in the world. Berger said that silence is like an outstretched hand, and for me the silence of these languages is like an outstretched hand. I want to grab that hand and I would like us all to reach it.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIRTUAL REALITY ACCORDING TO LENA HERZOG

And what do you think instead of the enormous impact of images within our era? Could this be one of the reasons why languages keep disappearing?

This is a very interesting thought since today there is undoubtedly an enormous overproduction of images. Think of me for example: I was born as a photographer, but when I started I was dealing with large format negatives that I handled in my personal laboratory inside the darkroom. I usually take very few photos, which I develop with my own chemicals and which I print my way in the darkroom. What I want is discipline, I want to have control over what I see and what I hear. What I do is really pay a lot of attention and I think there should be a balance, a harmony, between "how you see" and "how you feel". And that again implies attention and concentration, concentration and attention.

And then, from analog photography you moved on to Virtual Reality. Why did you decide to make this project in VR?

I decided to use the medium of Virtual Reality because the idea required it, and the idea was to understand how to deal with absence. Obviously, an absence is faced by making something present, and Virtual Reality does it in such a vivid way that it is difficult to find elsewhere. So I decided to create a sense both for the presence of these voices and for the world by creating a work made not only of sounds but also of images. I created landscapes that I wanted to stand out in the soul and heart of everyone to host these worlds. And that's why Virtual Reality seemed like the right way to go. In fact, the first edition of Last Whispers, the one that debuted at the British Museum in 2016, consisted only of a video in a frame, supported by a spatialized sound, not surround, but with the spatialized voices: voices here, other voices. beyond and so on. Having spatialized the sound, the whole became a sound sculpture. What happened at the British Museum was that the public was always telling me they wanted to see images everywhere. This happens because the brain tries to connect the sound to the image since the image was in the frame, while the sound was not. Sound was everywhere. For this reason, visitors wanted it everywhere. In other words, they wanted to feel right in the middle.

And instead with Virtual Reality?

What I created in VR exists both as a Virtual Reality and as an immersive, fully immersive projection. In this way it is possible to enjoy the experience by projecting the video in VR in rooms, inside spheres or in the environment of a planetarium, like in a dome. By doing so, what you see in the viewers can also be projected. Once again the aim is to face the idea of making the absence of those presences so vivid that you miss them, and it even seems to you that you have already known those people, and to travel through landscapes that allow you to reach an aesthetic state. I want to put the user in a condition in which those presences can feel them, in which they can feel them.

In fact, one of the most interesting things about Virtual Reality is precisely this very strong contrast that is created between the concept of evanescence and the feeling of being inside something ...

Yes, in addition to the idea itself, what interested me a lot was how to make an idea full of life. This is the really important task. For example, when I do photography in the dark room - because I am an analog girl - I do it with techniques that were used in the dawn of this technology, in the beginnings of photography. Why am I interested in working this way? It is not for sentimental reasons. I care because when photographers were starting out, everything was open. The horizon was open: they knew no limits. And this is reflected in the technology of that era, you can feel it, you can feel it. Virtual Reality is a technology in its infancy, it is a technology in its infancy. So many aspects of it are still rough. And the magic is often found in the rough edges, when things aren't settled yet, when they aren't smoothed out. It is then that you can actually explore something as it is open.

What do you think, at this point, of the fragility of new technologies?

Well, fragility has always been inherent in new technologies, now it is exaggerated because it is the between the same fragility to appear so evident to us. And I think over time this feeling will be more and more. So technology is an expression of us, of our time, but it is also possible that we will not leave any trace of this as all these digital things will one day be obsolete and suddenly we will look at the only things that will really survive as paintings and old daguerreotypes. This is absolutely a possibility. But there are other similar art forms, let's think about dance. Nietzsche said that all art aspires to music, but he was also very fascinated by dance which is a very ephemeral form: it only happens at that moment, even if it is recorded.

Maggie Morris 12/12/19 Maggie Morris 12/12/19

#851 DOCLAB: USING VR TO VISUALIZE LANGUAGE EXTINCTION WITH LENA HERZOG’S “LAST WHISPERS”

Last Whispers is a virtual reality experience that visualizes the extinction of languages around the world. Director Lena Herzog says that there are about 7,000 active languages on the planet, but that we’re loosing one to two languages a week due to climate change displacement as well as different factors of economic and cultural colonialism. She says that we’re on pace to live in a world that only has 30 different languages, and so she wanted to try to tackle the problem of “How do you tell the story of silence?”

I had a chance to talk to Herzog at the IDFA DocLab about the process of designing and developing Last Whispers, her collaboration with Emblematic Group, why she felt like this piece needed to have the full immersion of VR, and the need to move beyond binary thinking in being able to preserve cultural heritage through pride of language while also being worldly and engaged with the rest of the world. We also cover some of the more philosophical aspects with Herzog saying that language is our first creative act, that it’s extremely democratic, and how it is able to embed many aspects of culture and understanding.

Maggie Morris 11/23/19 Maggie Morris 11/23/19

RADIO / FRANCE INTER

Lena Herzog s’empare de ce sujet et crée "Last Whispers", un oratorio immersif qui nous fait entendre en son binaural ces voix, pour la plupart éteintes, que l’on reçoit comme la lumière d’étoiles mortes, mariées au bruit du vent, et à des images de forêt, de fleuves et de ciel ennuagé : 50 minutes d’émotion pure.

Peut-on s’imaginer vivre un jour dans un monde où tout le monde parlera en globish, ce jargon bien suffisant pour consommer et obéir à son patron dans un monde dominé par le capitalisme international qui brûle les forêts pour y cultiver de quoi faire rouler ses grosses bagnoles ? le linguiste Claude Hagège nous le répète avec colère et d’angoisse : laisser mourir les langues des hommes – l’une d’elles, on le sait, s’éteint chaque semaine faute de locuteurs en vie – c’est perdre de notre humanité, appauvrir notre culture, et abdiquer de notre liberté face à l’argent-roi. L’ONU et l’Unesco ont fait de 2019 l’année internationale des langues autochtones. Aujourd’hui environ 7000 existent encore, mais la moitié d’entre elles auront disparu d’ici la fin du siècle.

Le savoir est une chose, mais le ressentir charnellement, l’entendre, le voir est bien plus important. Et seul un artiste peut nous amener à ce stade supérieur de la conscience. Lena Herzog est connue à travers le monde par ses photos et ses documentaires. Elle nous propose aujourd'hui une expérience radicalement nouvelle en nous immergeant dans un spectacle sonore et visuel, onirique et bouleversant, intitulé Last Whispers, oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes & A Falling Tree. Son film nous fait entendre en son binaural ces voix, pour la plupart éteintes, que l’on reçoit comme la lumière d’étoiles mortes, mariées au bruit du vent, et à des images de forêt, de fleuves et de ciel ennuagé, 50 minutes d’émotion pure qui ont été déjà partagées dans le cadre du Festival d’automne au Théâtre de la Ville ces jours-ci, et que vous pourrez encore voir le 7 décembre à la Maison de la Musique à Nanterre.

A l'occasion de la création de ce spectacle, un site (en anglais ) est consacré au projet Last Whispers

LE SPECTACLE, DANS LE CADRE DU PROGRAMME « L’AUTOMNE AU LYCÉE », SE DÉPLACE DANS LES LYCÉES:

Projection/écoute au casque en son binaural Introduction puis débat avec les lycéens:
* Jeudi 28 novembre 2019, Lycée Jean-Baptiste Corot à Savigny-sur-Orge (91)
* Vendredi 29 novembre 2019, Lycée Bergson à Paris (75)

*Janvier 2020, Lycée Madeleine Vionnet à Bondy (93)

*Mercredi 26 février 2020, Lycée Cognacq-Jay à Argenteuil (95)

*Jeudi 27 février 2020, Lycée Colbert à Paris (10e)

EXTRAITS DE L'ENTRETIEN AVEC LENA HERZOG:

“L'extinction des langues et des cultures est un marqueur de ce qu'il se passe, je voulais le faire entendre, faire résonner l'alarme, ce que l'on entend d’abord dans l'oratorio c'est une cloche ...Pour qui sonne le glas?Le glas sonne pour nous" “

L'Humeur Vagabonde vous recommande:

A voir et revoir en replay la soirée spéciale « Fluctuat nec mergitur » sur France 3 dans "Libre Court", l’émission du court métrage :4 ans après les événements du 13 novembre 2015, 2 courts-métrages inédits à la télévision interrogent les liens entre cinéma et Histoire récente, 2 visions différentes du monde dans lequel on vit.

Maggie Morris 11/20/19 Maggie Morris 11/20/19

LENA HERZOG: «J’AI ÉCOUTÉ CES VOIX, LEUR MUSICALITÉ, LEUR HUMANITÉ»

Avec « Last Whispers », création audiovisuelle sur les langues menacées de disparition, la photographe met en images des enregistrements autochtones. Un oratorio cosmique.

Propos recueillis par Pierre Gervasoni

A l'occasion de la création de ce spectacle, un site (en anglais ) est consacré au projet Last Whispers

LE SPECTACLE, DANS LE CADRE DU PROGRAMME « L’AUTOMNE AU LYCÉE », SE DÉPLACE DANS LES LYCÉES:

*Janvier 2020, Lycée Madeleine Vionnet à Bondy (93)

*Mercredi 26 février 2020, Lycée Cognacq-Jay à Argenteuil (95)

*Jeudi 27 février 2020, Lycée Colbert à Paris (10e)

EXTRAITS DE L'ENTRETIEN AVEC LENA HERZOG:

L'Humeur Vagabonde vous recommande:

Maggie Morris 10/31/19 Maggie Morris 10/31/19

EL SOL DE MÉXICO ÚLTIMOS SUSPIROS, ORATORIO INMERSIVO DE LENA HERZOG LLEGA A LOS PINOS

Carmen Sánchez | El Sol de México

La artista visual Lena Herzog presentará en el Complejo Cultural Los Pinos, el 2 y tres de noviembre próximo, su trabajo Last Whispers (Últimos Suspiros. Oratorio inmersivo por las voces desapareciendo, los universos colapsando y el árbol), título que alude a que: “la desaparición de las lenguas es callada, por eso no nos damos cuenta de esas extinciones”, dijo en entrevista.

“Una lengua muere cada dos semanas, entonces para mi, traerlo particularmente a lugares que son la casa de tantos idiomas como México, significa muchísimo”, expresó Herzog respecto a este trabajo visual que presenta en el Salón Adolfo López Mateos del mencionado recinto en el marco del Año de las Lenguas Originarias, decretado por la UNESCO.

“Siempre me han fascinado los idiomas, aprendí algunos cuando aún era niña. El habla es una experiencia humana que nos define”, expresó la artista de la lente y esposa del reconocido cineasta alemán Werner Herzog, quien informó que de la nación mexicana, aborda 40 lenguas en su oratorio.

La entrevistada mencionó que para la realización del oratorio inmersivo contó con el apoyo de algunas instancias como el Programa de Documentación de Idiomas en Peligro y el Instituto de Idiomas Mundiales de la Escuela de Estudios Orientales y Africanos (SOAS por su nombre en inglés) de la Universidad de Londres.

Respecto a cuánto tiempo le tomó este estudio, la artista ruso estadounidense refirió que le tomó alrededor de 20 años para concretar la idea y en el trayecto se relacionó con lingüistas y “al menos 200 expertos activistas y entusiastas”.

Maggie Morris 10/11/19 Maggie Morris 10/11/19

LENA HERZOG TALKS ‘LAST WHISPERS’ SHOW AT THE FORD THEATER

A human language dies every two weeks!

Today, a majority of the world’s population speaks only 30 of the 7,000 languages remaining on earth. It is estimated that at least half of the currently spoken languages will have died by the end of this century; the majority belonging to indigenous peoples. So on June 14th at the Ford Theater (across from the Hollywood Bowl) there is an immersive "show" about this topic called Last Whispers.

Lena Herzog, the creator of the show, tells us more.

Maggie Morris 10/11/19 Maggie Morris 10/11/19

DYING LANGUAGES CRY OUT IN “LAST WHISPERS”

MUSIC / NYTIMES.COM
by Zachary Woolfe
Published on October 11th, 2019

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — The earth spins onscreen amid an eerie, uncomfortable sound, like a building rush of air. It’s an ominous, galactic vision that swiftly condenses into an intimate one: A dot of flickering light in the middle of darkness; a woman’s voice singing, her fragile intakes of breath audible; an electric guitar strumming with spare, melancholy sweetness.

Her words are unfamiliar, a little guttural, the consonants chewy. A title tells us that the woman is singing in Ingrian, a nearly extinct Finnic language spoken now by just a handful of people in western Russia.

It is one of over three dozen endangered languages heard in “Last Whispers,” a film and surround-sound experience that will be screened Oct. 16-20 at Peak Performances at Montclair State University. Its creator, the artist Lena Herzog, calls it “an oratorio for vanishing voices, collapsing universes and a falling tree” — as good a classification as any for an unclassifiable work.

The 45-minute piece confronts a startling reality: According to Unesco, nearly half of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages are endangered. But Ms. Herzog approaches this dismal subject in a decidedly poetic, almost abstract way, conveying the aura of all that’s being lost rather than haranguing.

“***… an unclassifiable work."***

Ms. Herzog approaches this dismal subject in a decidedly poetic, almost abstract way, conveying the aura of all that’s being lost rather than haranguing.
That we don’t see the speakers and can’t know what’s being said is the point of this austere and poignant Babel. The musical landscape is sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but it always keeps our attention on the rich, incomprehensible, often overlapping chorus of words.”

So reverberant chant in Bathari, a language spoken by perhaps a few dozen people in Oman, sounds alongside enigmatic footage of rock formations. A blurry figure walks in the distance, eventually covered by pages and pages of scrolling script, as we listen to the evocative Ahom language of India. A child speaks Light Warlpiri, which has a few hundred native speakers in northern Australia.

That we don’t see the speakers and can’t know what’s being said is the point of this austere and poignant Babel. The musical landscape is sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but it always keeps our attention on the rich, incomprehensible, often overlapping chorus of words. The camera slowly approaches ghostly forests, bodies of water and, through space, our planet — imagery that suggests the language crisis interacts with, and is in part caused by, even graver threats to earth’s sustainability.

Ms. Herzog dates the origins of “Last Whispers” to more than 15 years ago, and her interest in languages even further — back to when, as a young girl growing up in Russia, she struggled to learn English to understand a Sherlock Holmes story that turned on the deciphering of a code presented as dancing stick figures.

“The more you learn about languages,” she said in a telephone interview, “the more you learn they’re all vanishing. What was confounding to me was how little we know about that extinction. And we are losing languages at a more rapid pace.”

A photographer, she years ago found herself in the habit of listening to archival language recordings while printing in her darkroom. At first, she envisioned creating a gallery full of portraits of last speakers of these languages, with recordings emanating from behind the prints.

“But we separate ourselves from them because they’re in portrait, they’re the other,” she said. “I wanted us to feel enmeshed in them: They’re us.”

The more literal, visual aspect of the portraits began to disappear, but the notion of immersive sound remained. (The artist and anthropologist Susan Hiller has also made work about vanishing tongues that focuses on sound.) Poring through endless audio files of endangered languages being spoken, Ms. Herzog began a largely intuitive selection process.

“I would mark the ones to which I responded,” she said. “I couldn’t articulate it in words. I knew how I wanted it to feel. I wanted it to be haunting, to be able to get into your cerebellum. I would go through hours listening to these voices talking, chanting, whispering, confessing.”

Since she lacked a background in music or sound engineering, Ms. Herzog cast around for a composer-designer who could help her organize this sprawling archive of voices. Eventually she settled on a pair: Marco Capalbo, a composer and director, and Mark Mangini, an Academy Award-winning sound designer (“Mad Max: Fury Road”), who each contributed sections of the finished piece.

Their styles ended up being complementary: Mr. Mangini treats the voices with a lyrical, Romantic touch — a “21st-century version of Rachmaninoff,” as Ms. Herzog put it — while Mr. Capalbo’s landscape is tougher and more aggressive, laced with the sound, translated into audible frequencies, of collapsing stars.

Some early ideas were a bit outlandish: At one point, Ms. Herzog intended to pump the sound mix through the root systems of trees, for an effect that would be audible by listening closely to the trunks. (“No park would let us,” Mr. Mangini said dryly.) Then there was a notion of mounting speakers high up in a forest grove.

Eventually, the collaborators settled on a more traditional theatrical experience: a film element and surround-sound accompaniment. Or, depending how you look at it, a surround-sound oratorio — a kind of sonic sculpture — with an accompanying film.

“It’s not a documentary, in the classic sense,” said Jedediah Wheeler, the director of Peak Performances. “It’s not spelling out the problem. It’s coming from a deep place in Lena.”

The screenings in Montclair will be paired with panel discussions, featuring scholars and activists, about language revitalization efforts in the New York area and worldwide. (Ms. Herzog has also created lastwhispers.org, which has more information about the issue.) Together, “Last Whispers” and the accompanying programs will present two sides — the artistic and the direct-action, the suggestive and the concrete — of a global tragedy.

“The form this extinction takes is silence,” Ms. Herzog said. “By definition, this extinction takes place in silence. How do you show that? You show it by sounding what has gone silent.”

Maggie Morris 6/10/19 Maggie Morris 6/10/19

LENA HERZOG’S “LAST WHISPERS”

Elizabeth Gerber, Education and Public Programs

On Saturday, June 15, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan will be in conversation with artist Lena Herzog at 2 pm in LACMA’s Bing Theater. Visitors will be able to experience Herzog’s virtual reality project Last Whispers VR: An Immersive Oratorio between 11 am and 2 pm, and between 3 and 6 pm on the day of the talk. In advance of these upcoming events, we spoke with Herzog about the Last Whispers project.

Still from *Last Whispers*, courtesy of Lena Herzog

What was your inspiration for Last Whispers?

It wasn’t one thing. I grew up quite a bit language crazy and wondered about linguistic “mechanics” in the formation of thought, belief, and doubt early on before I ever knew that there was such a discipline as linguistics. I worked as a proof reader at a printing press, studied Language and Literature at the Philological Faculty of the (at the time) Leningrad University.

Ultimately, human language capacity always stunned me. It is our first, highly abstract and foundational creative act that we all do, and it is the key to how we define the world and ourselves in it, how we think. The fact that human creativity is so vast and various is an optimistic proposition. The fact of linguistic extinction is not only alarming but is difficult to address because the form this particular extinction takes is silence. This difficulty confounded and obsessed me. So the project came about from this long haunting wonder.

How has your study and work in philosophy and linguistics (philology) influenced your artistic practice?

One of the main effects is my skepticism towards concepts. I find that work which leans heavily on concepts alone seems to be doing so not knowing that these seemingly profound ideas are digests from Philosophy 101. Language study had produced that effect of skepticism originally. It is underestimated how “radical” it is to engage in a study of language because you end up arriving to the most interesting and dangerous place of all: questioning definitions.

Did you always envision Last Whispers to be presented through VR or has it changed over time?

Last Whispers has undergone some serious metamorphosis. The very first iteration of it was an essay about the phenomenon of language extinction. Then, as I became a photographer, I devised to create a gallery of the last speakers’ portraits rigged with their recordings. But it occurred to me that the moment you see their faces, as an audience you separate yourself from them, and I wanted the opposite: I wanted us to feel as if it is all of us who are the last speakers. I came very close to making it an audio-haptic display in a forest where every tree was rigged to become a loud speaker projecting voices singing, speaking, and chanting in extinct and endangered languages. Well, I could not find a single arborist who’d sign off on that, so I set out to create an immersive choral work and brought the forest into the video and audio instead. The iteration went from a clear didactic essayistic form to an unclear and difficult to define immersive one.

Last Whispers has multiple parts: a 45 minute audio video immersive installation and a 7 minute virtual reality experience, for example. Why have you chosen to explore this topic through these multiple approaches?

The original 45 min AV piece will be shown at the Ford Theatres on June 14, and I call it an “audio video installation.” Essentially, it is a four dimensional sound sculpture (designed in time and in space) and a lyrical video comprising a 45 minutes immersive work dedicated to language extinction. Neurologically, we register such “spacialized” sound environment as present. So, we hear the voices as if the speakers are singing and talking right next to you, around you, present, alive, urgent. When the work first showed at The Living and Dying Gallery of The British Museum it had an effect on people: they stopped in their tracks, they listened, lingered, they shushed each other…

VR went all the way into immersion however; it became its own animal. It works differently from the collective experience in a theater or a museum, and the medium has its own rules, even its own gravity. Indeed, in VR you have to think of the physics of the world you create from scratch.

One of the most attractive things about virtual reality right now is the fact that it is still so rough shot, still figuring its way around—a medium “still in diapers.” So I loved working with the engineers and coders at Emblematic because they were so open to invention when we were making Last Whispers VR. A lot was possible precisely because VR is still unsettled and not slick. I hope to make two more parts to complete the VR trilogy.

Who did you collaborate with on this project?

My brilliant team: the researchers Theresa Schwartzman and Evelyn Villa, the animator Amanda Tasse, drone operator Tomas Van Houtryve, designer Maggie Morris. Marco Capalbo and Mark Mangini are the phenomenal sound designers—crucial in the project. The heroes of the story are the linguists, archivists, and the endangered language speakers. That was maybe one of the most challenging aspects of this project as I went from being the lone ranger with cameras in the world, then in my darkroom to working with vast numbers of people from many walks of life all around the globe.

Friday, June 14 and Saturday, June 15 are exciting days for Last Whispers in Los Angeles. What do you hope L.A. audiences will take away from these events?

I hope the work stays with them. What more could one ask?

Could you share additional resources for people to learn more about endangered languages?

Last Whispers Project and Non Profit
UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages
SOAS Endangered Language Archive

Maggie Morris 2/22/19 Maggie Morris 2/22/19

RESISTING OBLIVION: LENA HERZOG INTERVIEWED BY KELLYLOUISE DELANEY

Documenting disappearing languages

Lena Herzog, *Last Whispers*, 2016. Screen Still

By 2050, half of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken around the world will fall silent—thanks in large part to globalization. As the language of a people dies, an integral piece of the culture it once helped to construct goes along with it, diluting the world’s understanding of itself. Hoping to call awareness to the tragedy of our world’s quietly diminishing identity, multimedia artist Lena Herzog has composed Last Whispers (2016). The forty-five-minute immersive oratorio with a seven-minute virtual-reality component catalogs a melancholic sampling of the voices behind endangered and extinct languages.

With understated visuals of natural landscapes accompanying an audio composition that seamlessly weaves song and story together as the piece visits various territories around the world, the installation invites viewers to understand language by feeling it. Herzog worked alongside the Endangered Languages Archive, the SOAS World Languages Institute, and UNESCO to gather recordings of indigenous voices, but scrolling through audio libraries to curate her piece didn’t appeal to her. Instead, she incorporated the voices into her other creative work, listening to thousands of recordings as she developed photos in the dark room and marking the ones that stood out.

Her fascination with language is intrinsic to her identity, with conspicuous roots in her early childhood, when she began teaching herself English; she read Sherlock Holmes in both her native Russian and English along with a grammar book, translating line for line. In her later travels around the world she encountered native indigenous speakers in places like Japan and Amazonia, whom she recorded. Last Whispers is the summation of decades of research and thought into the meaning and impact of linguistic diversity.

Maggie Morris 2/5/19 Maggie Morris 2/5/19

SUNDANCE 2019: THE EMPATHY OF VIRTUAL REALITY

In "Last Whispers: An Immersive Oratorio" (a project also involving Nonny de la Peña), the cross-media artist Lena Herzog isn’t creating a new reality but instead is hoping to revive those that have been lost. "Whispers" explores languages that are endangered or extinct underscoring the ways in which we are losing our linguistic diversity and ultimately the way we understand ourselves.

“Every two weeks a language dies,” a passionate Herzog exclaimed. “The reason they are falling silent is because young generations do not speak it. The reason they are falling silent is because of genocides, climate change and people getting uprooted and having to put roots in other cultures and switch to other languages when they have to join other communities. The reason they are falling silent is because of colonization. I mean why would the Americas speak Spanish? There is a very clear answer to that—it’s because of this conquest by the Spaniards. Why is that we’re speaking English here? So, the Roman Empire alone, some speculate but it’s really hard to tell because it was a while ago and there wasn’t really research, was probably responsible for some thousand languages—the Roman Empire alone, of erasing them. Why is that languages have fallen silent? Because of globalization—cultural globalization.”

"Last Whispers" is an incredible universe that encapsulates all of these endangered and extinct languages as they swirl around you. It’s an octa-phonic design created in such a way that the frequencies hit your ears with a physical presence. This technology is incredible in that it makes the listener feel as if the languages being spoken throughout the oratorio are sharing your physical space. In this way as the sounds of the voices begin to fade, you feel that presence leave you, you feel that extinction happening. This magnificent aural experience was an intentional creation by Herzog.

“A very profound philosophical dilemma that I understood about that was that it had to do with the very nature of extinction,” she said. “The very nature of extinction is silence and we understand something when we articulate it and how we articulate it. So, it’s the very crux of the problem. So then came a really interesting challenge—how do you articulate an extinction, the form of which is silence? A very sort of direct obvious answer is to sound what has gone silent. But how do you do that? How do you really make it present? So, I started to research about how do we perceive something as present neurologically and that’s when I knew I had to have a sound team that would create an 8.1 for public presentation or a binaural for personal experience in the headphone mixes because our brain perceives that sound as present and alive.”

The visuals of "Last Whispers" are just as captivating. Herzog had originally done the visuals in her original 46-minute, 2D piece but felt it necessary to allow viewers to be inside the world that she had created. Viewers become enclosed in a sphere that encircles you as the approximate place of origin for each language is geolocated on the globe. The context provided with the visuals adds to the haunting reverberations of invocation of languages lost and incantation of those that are endangered or extinct underscoring the ways in which we are losing our linguistic diversity and ultimately the way we understand ourselves.

Maggie Morris 10/16/18 Maggie Morris 10/16/18

“LAST WHISPERS” BY LENA HERZOG

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last Whispers is a multimedia installation by Lena Herzog—with sound by Mark Mangini and Marco Capalbo—in collaboration with the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the SOAS World Languages Institute, SOAS, University of London and it is co-presented by the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, UNESCO. The following trailer and text by Lena Herzog were originally published on the project’s website.

Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes, and a Falling Tree. The origins of the project.

At the age of six I decided to learn English so that I could understand a puzzle in a Sherlock Holmes story. I had to know how the detective had decoded a death threat to his client’s wife in The Adventure of the Dancing Men. The key to that puzzle was the recognition of the recurring definite article “the”—a mysterious notion to me then since articles do not exist in Russian. I grew up in the Urals, on the western border of Siberia, where very few people spoke foreign languages. I picked up Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original in English, along with a dictionary and a grammar text book, and struggled through the entire book line by line. Later, also prompted by the desire to read literature in the original, I studied French and Spanish and, worked as a proof-reader at a printing press in Saint Petersburg, next to the compositors that were busily nestling letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into novels at a staggering speed, throwing proofs over to my table like hot bread. So it made sense to me that when I went to Saint Petersburg University, the door plaque of my faculty read “philology” φιλολογία—including the original Greek, which means “love of the word.” However, all my plans to become a Russian novelist were upended by a complete linguistic dislocation to American English at age twenty, when I moved to the United States. The sense of personal language loss was concrete and overwhelming, alerting me to a far more universal and dire fate for most languages.

The idea for a project specifically on the mass extinction of languages came to me more than two decades ago. My old failed 2003 Guggenheim application was titled “Vanishing Cultures” and was at first, in part, a photographic project. I’d planned to take large-format portraits of the last speakers of various languages and place them in a room filled with their whispering voices. The concept of sounding vanished voices by broadcasting them as a muffled chorus was already central and clearly articulated in my description of the project back then.

I realized that indigenous communities give up their languages and switch to dominant ones under pressure from the forces of globalization. My next natural iteration of this idea involved shedding the images of the speakers and having only voices in a forest. When a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? This old philosophical trope, the basic epistemological exercise, seemed handy. What is our sense of the unobserved, unheard worlds? I have come to think of this old exercise as one in empathy: Does it matter that trees and universes collapse all around us? Somewhere, between our obliviousness to others and our own inevitable oblivion, rest the scales of some brutal justice.

My team and I began amassing a giant library of recordings of extinct and endangered languages on loan from international archives, working closely with many collections, linguists, and anthropologists in the field. Our main collaborator was the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, a project of SOAS University of London that is headed by Mandana Seyfeddinipur. When I went through their archives online, I realized there would be no point in just “stacking” languages back-to-back to form a single piece. Because these recordings were already public, generously so, it would have been possible to perform this kind of compilation just by clicking “next” on their website, and that would have been too obvious a gesture for the work I had in mind.

While working in my studio and darkroom, I created a setup that randomly played thousands of these recordings, one after another. I marked those that felt right for the oratorio I was planning and began narrowing down the library. The extraordinary researcher Theresa Schwartzman, in Los Angeles, and her counterpart in London, Eveling Villa, began reaching out to archives, linguists, and indigenous communities (when this was possible) to obtain rights and permissions for the recordings. Sometimes there was no community to reach. We went beyond the letter of the law, which held that the copyright resided with the linguists and the archives, and tried to reach those who claimed heritage to the language. Sometimes last speakers changed their minds, turning us down mid-composition and mid-film, and we had to redo the work from scratch, rescore and rethink. Each case had a story, most often a tragic one. We began to publish some of them on our website.

Every dialogue with a linguist, no matter how banal, brought insight. The professionals who travel and live among these last speakers are the unsung heroes in this story; they are the ones who collect, preserve, and help revitalize endangered languages. In my dealings with them, they were the advocates for the last speakers’ rights. One might think that they would number enough to form an army, but there are barely enough of them for a battalion. Most work alongside volunteers and language enthusiasts. And all of them, at least those that I have met, are on the side of indigenous peoples. To put it in espionage terms, linguists of endangered languages almost always “go native.” They are the ones who hear the trees falling in the forest. Our long list of credits names both the speakers and the linguists—meticulously.

The polyphonic global chorus that I heard had the makings of an astonishing oratorio, and to bring it into a public space beyond the form of the archive, I needed music and imagery that would reveal it in a condensed form. This form had to be invented organically; it had to come from the recordings, from the voices themselves.

Marco Capalbo and Mark Mangini, who work fluidly in both sound design and composition, joined the team, and we began to shape the oratorio from our already-narrowed library. My concept was multilayered and concrete: it included the use of sounds of Russian bells, forest noises, wind, interpreted gravitational waves from outer space registered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (a.k.a. “the Listening Ear”), and the specific parameters for the source library itself. In my first brainstorming session about the work, I wrote to Marco and Mark:

What is the balance of the piece? What holds it together?

The “founding idea” of making the work is based on the recordings of languages that had already vanished or are well on their way to extinction. The parameters within which the selection was made for the source library—I have defined. This is clearly a glue as the overall idea and basic building blocks. … Using cosmic sounds of the universe within the composition expands the arc. Gives us “eternal” time. … I really love the opening with the bell. The end will have to be a giant chorus that builds and builds and then abruptly vanishes—in an exhale.

Shifting from fragmentation to a lyrical cradling of the voices, then back to fragmentation, and ending with a finale of interwoven harmony and dissonance were key to the piece I was constructing with my team.

Listening to the sounds of the voices and the first sketches by Marco and Mark, the photographer Tomas van Houtryve and I mapped a precise choreography of drone footage. Animator Amanda Tasse and I decided to create a new topography for the world that would have no “real” geography. We collected NASA images of hurricanes, cut out their edges, and sewed them together, forming something like a digital quilt to cover the earth. I thought that the edges of these vortices textured the continents and islands well, lighting the globe like a strange marble.

There is lamentation and melancholy in the oratorio. How can it be otherwise? And yet it is not a requiem—it is an invocation of languages that have gone extinct and an incantation of those that are endangered. I myself got addicted to these vanishing voices. I listen to them all the time now. They remind me that despite the deafening noise of our own voices, we are floating on an ocean filled with the silence of others.

Lena Herzog
Lena Herzog studied Philosophy and Linguistics (Philology) and began working primarily in the field of photography and print making since 1997. Herzog is the author of six books of photography; her work has been widely published and reviewed by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review among many others. She is a regular contributing artist to Harper’s Magazine. Her work has been collected and exhibited in major museums and institutions around the world.

Maggie Morris 2/2/18 Maggie Morris 2/2/18

LENA HERZOG ON DYING LANGUAGES WITH ROBERT HARRISON

About Guest:

Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who lives in Los Angeles. Born in the Ural mountains of Russia, she moved to the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) to study Languages and Literature at Leningrad University. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and worked at Stanford University two years later as a research consultant. She then completed her BA in Philosophy at Mills College, specializing in the history and the philosophy of science and doing a comparative study of the paradigm shift theories of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

In 1997, she discovered photography, and apprenticed to Italian and French printmakers, with a special interest in early and alternative photographic processes. Her work now ranges from classical documentary to the experimental and conceptual.

Her photography has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Cabinet Magazine, The Believer, Vanity Fair, among others, and she is a regular contributing artist to Harper's Magazine. She is the author of six books of photography and her work has been internationally exhibited. Her book "Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen", was published by TASCHEN in 2015.

In this interview, Lena and Robert discuss Herzog's new immersive sound and video installation entitled: "Last Whispers, Oratorio for Vanished Voices, Collapsing Universes and A Falling Tree”, which recently premiered at The British Museum.