by Eva Oddo

In a city silence can seem like a luxury. With aural and visual communication battling it out for one’s attention, giving one’s senses to nothing and no one feels like a small act of rebellion.

Which is, indeed, what Susan Hiller’s work, ‘The Last Silent Movie’, exhibited at Matt’s Gallery in London, feels like.

Susan Hiller has assembled sound recordings of 25 extinct or endangered languages from various anthropological sound archives and created a video, where each extract is introduced and its status indicated (e.g. K’ora (extinct)), and then played out over a black screen, with translation subtitles of what the viewer is hearing. In addition to this, Hiller has created etchings of an oscilloscope diagram of a phrase or so of each language.

Therefore, Hiller’s rebellious act involves not distancing herself from the fray of communicated language and information, but rather adding to it and having a go at its dominant forces. To call this a losing battle is an understatement, but one still should not give up. Hiller certainly hasn’t.

From the start, language is a field of contention: often cited as an identity definer, a tool for both inclusion and exclusion, and generationally divisive, to name just a few discussion points.

On the other hand, English has established itself firmly as the world’s lingua franca, and we all communicate through many more means, with much more ease and at higher speed than ever before. So what is the problem?

The point is, of course, that language is not just communication. And although we may not know what the voices in Hiller’s piece are saying (why should we trust the translation, after all, and, indeed, there is one voice without translation), there is a feeling of loss.

However, there is no sense of nostalgia, but rather a matter-of-factness and a quiet determination to propose the potential for varying realities which each language might encompass, as Mark Godfrey suggests in the booklet accompanying the exhibition.

Where a language is extinct, it often means that the recording we are hearing is of the last person to have spoken the language.

And, just like one cannot dismiss a person because they are dead, or think they are somehow ‘less’ because no longer here, a language does not lose its value because it is no longer spoken, or because it is spoken by only a handful of people. Languages never become truly obsolete. If this were the case, Shakespeare would not be so ubiquitous.

By the way in which it is connected to humans, language is itself a living thing, and even extinct languages live on in spirit, in this case in the form of Hiller’s piece.

However, Mark Godfrey also points to the fact that the audio extracts we hear were recorded within a framework for the purpose of anthropological study, and therefore do not represent the most natural context in which a language would have been spoken, between people fluent in it. This is of course an important factor, and Godfrey adds that the use of language that some artists make in their work serves to heighten one’s attention to the inequities, past and present, of cultural exchange, dialogue, and communication. Hiller turns her material on its head, and uses it to communicate something beyond itself, beyond its original intended purpose, or at least as a tool to open the floor to questions, rather than as a means to reach a thesis or a conclusion.

‘The Last Silent Movie’ seems to suggest that, while the world is opening, it is also narrowing, and becoming poorer for it. If we keep on moving so fast, and all heading towards the same centre, there is the obvious and ever present danger of leaving things behind. Whether these things (in this particular case languages) are missed does not really matter, for it is their absence, however unrealised, that counts. And somehow it feels better if we are not all talking the same language. Or at least not all the time.

[‘The Silent Movie’ was shown at Matt’s Gallery, 42-44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR, on July 12, 13, 19, 20, 26 & 27, 2008]

www.mattsgallery.org

Susan Hiller ‘The Last Silent Movie’ 2007 (video still). Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London