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.