table of contents

02/02/2018

Lena Herzog on dying languages

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 […]

download transcript [vtt]
00:00:00.000
Dear and title opinions listeners, my name is Vituri Amalam and I am the producer for entitled opinions.
00:00:08.000
I am making this brief announcement today to inform you that entitled opinions will be back with a new season of shows this coming spring.
00:00:18.000
In the meantime, we have decided to air a new episode, which will hopefully feel like a momentary awakening from this period of hibernation.
00:00:29.500
In this episode, Robert Harrison interviews the renowned photographer and visual artist, Lena Herzog.
00:00:37.500
I hope that you will enjoy listening to this conversation and I look forward to coming back with a new season in the spring. Take care.
00:00:46.500
Thank you.
00:00:48.500
[Music]
00:00:58.500
[Music]
00:01:06.500
[Music]
00:01:08.500
[Music]
00:01:18.500
[Music]
00:01:28.500
[Music]
00:01:38.500
[Music]
00:01:52.500
This is KZSU Stanford.
00:01:55.500
[Music]
00:02:10.500
[Music]
00:02:29.500
It has been estimated that 99.9% of the species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Most of them long before are restless human race ever roamed the Earth.
00:02:42.500
So yes, they all go into the dark and we humans all go with them.
00:02:48.500
And so too do our human languages.
00:02:52.500
When the last speaker of a living language is buried, that language follows her into the silent funeral, into the Sélance et
00:02:59.500
des Hernèle of those interstellar spaces that terrified our comrade, Blaze Pascad.
00:03:09.500
What is it that disappears when a language goes extinct? A dwelling place, a domicile, a house of being, as Heidegger called it,
00:03:21.500
Being cannot survive in the wild of bises and gravitational waves of the space-time continuum.
00:03:28.500
If it is to be at all, it needs to be housed.
00:03:33.500
Hernèle famously declared that language is the house of being, and he cautioned against taking his statement metaphorically.
00:03:41.500
I quote, "The talk about the house of being is no transfer of the image house to being, but one day we will, by thinking the essence of being
00:03:50.500
in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what house and to dwell are."
00:03:58.500
From our present vantage point, it seems unlikely that we will be thinking the essence of being in a more appropriate manner anytime soon.
00:04:08.500
As Heidegger himself avowed shortly before he died in 1976, I quote, "the growing and
00:04:17.500
an unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age."
00:04:28.500
Meanwhile, we keep losing at an astonishing rate many of the world's spoken languages.
00:04:35.500
While the so-called sixth extinction is taking place in nature, a comparable extinction is taking place in culture,
00:04:43.500
among the diverse houses of being that human beings have built and lived in for centuries and even millennia.
00:04:51.500
I'm joined in the studio today by the renowned photographer and visual artist Lena Hernèle Zog.
00:04:57.500
She is well known to the entitled "Pinience Brigade" from the show I did with her on photography a few years back.
00:05:03.500
That show remains one of our most popular broadcasts.
00:05:07.500
Lena Hernèle Zog is the author of six books of photography, including Lost Souls, which was the focus of the entitled "Pinience Show" we did back in 2013.
00:05:18.500
She is back in the Bay Area for a screening of her new Immersive Sound and Video installation about the silent, mass extinction of languages that is taking place across the world today.
00:05:31.500
She calls it "last whispers or a torial for vanished voices, collapsing universes, and a falling tree."
00:05:40.500
It premiered at the British Museum during the Bloomsbury Festival in 2016 and will be opening in San Francisco soon.
00:05:49.500
I had the privilege of attending a screening of it recently and I was specially pleased to have Lena Hernèle Zog with us again in the studios of KZSU to talk about her or a torial
00:06:00.500
the phenomenal and the phenomenal and linguistic extinction.
00:06:03.500
They're not welcome back to your favorite podcast in title opinions.
00:06:08.500
Thank you, Robert.
00:06:10.500
Your new artwork has a beautifully intriguing title "Last Whispers or a torial for vanished voices, collapsing universes, and a falling tree."
00:06:18.500
Why don't we work through those various terms maybe starting with "Last Whispers"? What do you intend by "Last Whispers"? And what do they refer to?
00:06:28.500
"Last Whispers" is really a description of the vanished voices that extinct and endangered languages.
00:06:39.500
And the extraordinary very surprising thing that occurred to me when I understood the sheer scale, the massive cosmic release scale of the linguistic diversity extinction was how many languages that majority of human languages are going extinct.
00:07:07.500
And when I started to look into it and listen to the recordings from the endangered language archives, a lot of them actually were whispers.
00:07:19.500
They were quiet, confessional voices.
00:07:24.500
In part it's because the interaction between a linguist and a last speaker is very much like between a radio host and a guest.
00:07:37.500
It's a bit of a priest and someone who does the confession.
00:07:43.500
But also because these people last speakers really have no longer anyone to talk to.
00:07:54.500
And it really was very clear to me that these were the last whispers that we had recorded if we were lucky because a lot of them go unreported.
00:08:06.500
And the language is a world, a culture, a sort of universe, and as Haidagah said it and you quoted in your very beautiful introduction, a house of being.
00:08:22.500
How do we know what we know? It all really boils down to the way we name things, to the definitions that we put to the world, to ourselves.
00:08:33.500
And the variousness of this human faculty is an astonishing fact.
00:08:39.500
So it felt very much like the metaphor of the world or the galaxy of which language seemed appropriate.
00:08:50.500
And as a matter of fact I decided to include some of the recent recordings of the frequencies of gravitational waves translated into something audible that were recorded by LIGO, the listening ear, and something that Kalta and MIT has worked on for many years.
00:09:14.500
And finally it was launched recently and Kip saw in the last year's Nobel Prize winner was one of our gracious contributors of the gravitational waves which we weaved in into the auditorium into the audio part.
00:09:30.500
What are gravitational waves?
00:09:33.500
There are frequency waves that are initiated by events, mostly catastrophic events, and supernova, death of a star, death of a world that has happened all the time.
00:09:46.500
As a matter of fact it turns out that galaxies are full of supernova.
00:09:51.500
Just as our own world is full of these collapsing universes and cultures vanishing at a astounding rate.
00:10:02.500
So it is estimated that at the moment there are between six and seven thousand languages.
00:10:09.500
And just very fact that there's such a huge margin of approximation gives you an idea that we don't really have an idea of how many languages are there.
00:10:20.500
We have some, but it's not exactly.
00:10:24.500
These are spoken languages.
00:10:25.500
Spoken languages, that's right.
00:10:27.500
And some of them vanish without us recording them.
00:10:31.500
So when a culture or a language dies, has it ever existed and it goes back to the old philosophical trope when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
00:10:44.500
And although this is a philosophical old exercise or an epistemological one, I personally think it's also an empathetic one.
00:10:53.500
In other words, do you grant the world that there are other things that happen in the matter?
00:11:00.500
That's really a crucial one.
00:11:02.500
Obviously my answer is a resounding yes to both.
00:11:06.500
And the subtitle "vanished voices collapsing universes and a falling tree" really refers to that exercise that I want us to embark on.
00:11:19.500
And other than knowing the problem, the scale of the problem and the sort of impoverishment that is occurring to us without us knowing it, I actually wanted us to really feel that, feel it under our skin.
00:11:35.500
Have it make its way into the cerebellum by hearing these voices and how do you make silence apparent you sound what has gone silent?
00:11:48.500
And it's like describing hunger.
00:11:51.500
How do you describe hunger? You describe it by describing bread.
00:11:55.500
And so the auditorio unlike my previous work which is all about image photography and the visual, this one sound came first.
00:12:08.500
So I began by, well my interest in language goes way back is a matter of fact, I studied a the philological faculty of, at the time, learning grad now,
00:12:18.500
some Petersburg University in Russia, so philologia the love of language which I actually love that name of the discipline.
00:12:27.500
That has been with me since a very long time.
00:12:30.500
And again, I do describe the love of a language you can describe it also by describing its disappearance as well.
00:12:39.500
So, and that's actually one of the fascinating things that you find when you think about language a lot of the times you find yourselves out of words.
00:12:49.500
How do you think about language outside of it is really not possible? You can't extract yourself from yourself like you cannot extract yourself from the very tool of which you are trying to think.
00:13:01.500
Although each one of us inhabits a linguistic universe of our language, our language house.
00:13:11.500
And when I saw your video audio video installation, I did not feel that I was inhabiting any of these languages because they were most of them so foreign.
00:13:24.500
But my hope for the inhabiting you.
00:13:27.500
They were certainly coming into me audio in the audio medium and it was creating a sense of uncanny estrangement that I, because clearly any human language, if you don't even understand a single word or syllable of the words, what is obvious is that it does intend to mean and it is there as a form of meaning.
00:13:55.500
And your exclusion from it gives a special pathos to the realization that you're hearing a language which maybe is already dead.
00:14:04.500
I think most of the languages, many of the languages that you give audio for in the installation are either extinct already or very close to extension. Is that correct?
00:14:15.500
Yes.
00:14:16.500
And we used 40 languages from 27 countries.
00:14:19.500
Most of them are extinct, but some of them are endangered or critically endangered.
00:14:26.500
As a matter of fact, on the day of the premiere of the British Museum, one of our languages went from critically extinct.
00:14:34.500
There was only one last speaker of some too that was still speaking, language he died that day.
00:14:41.500
So one of our endangered languages became extinct.
00:14:46.500
Of course, we have to realize that every two weeks a language dies.
00:14:52.500
You mentioned that the recordings are really like quiet whispers in the literal sense, right?
00:15:00.500
Mainly over them are.
00:15:01.500
And you compared the confessional in the priests and if our listeners could see our booth here, it looks very much like a priests confessional because we're in separate.
00:15:12.500
As a matter of fact, if I may interrupt you, we have been contacted and there's quite a bit of interest from very famous churches and cathedrals that have musical programs for their people who come to visit them, very well-known ones, by the way.
00:15:35.500
Like the Stefan's Dominguevien, for example, was in John the Divine New York. They've been interested in this work and showing it.
00:15:43.500
And it was all very familiar to them, the tone of it.
00:15:48.500
Why is that? They're priests.
00:15:51.500
Right.
00:15:52.500
Well, in fact, this is a question I wanted to ask you because the whispers are not what primarily came across to me in the experience of listening to the whole 48 minutes of it.
00:16:04.500
Because you chose a lot of chance and that was an interesting decision on your part to focus on the musical incantation of some of these languages, which is what I think these priests were recognizing because it sounded great affinity kinship with Gugorian chance and other things.
00:16:27.500
Yeah. Well, but they could almost be sung without words, no?
00:16:32.500
Right. Well, some of them are, for example, the part that's called the conversation. Those are almost all whispers.
00:16:40.500
And they have this sort of a confessional tone. But I wanted to really didn't feel right to do. I didn't want to make it a recuem.
00:16:50.500
There is a melancholic quality about it, no matter what. And I thought if it's a requiem, at least it has to be a very dislike requiem.
00:16:57.500
Remember how defiant it is. It's almost like a swear to God. There's a defiance in the face of oblivion in that requiem.
00:17:10.500
And I thought if it's a requiem at all, it's that kind of requiem.
00:17:15.500
But I wanted it more than anything to be a lyrical poem.
00:17:18.500
Right.
00:17:19.500
And so another thing that I wanted to create, and I worked with most brilliant, I was lucky as hell, most brilliant team, Mark Manjini and Mark of Capalbo.
00:17:34.500
It sound design is in composers. We worked to create a tug between the private and very intimate personal and a cosmic one.
00:17:47.500
The problem is of course enormous. There are thousands, most of them will be gone.
00:17:52.500
Most of us of seven billion people on this planet are speaking only 30 languages.
00:17:59.500
We call them dominant languages. The rest are really going.
00:18:03.500
So we wanted to create that sort of a cosmic chorus.
00:18:09.500
And yet also let people know and feel that each one is a very personal life, a life.
00:18:20.500
So from an individual to this world chorus was one of our tasks as well.
00:18:32.500
The fallen tree also in the title. So a language goes extinct.
00:18:38.500
It ceases to sound, but the strong suggestion is that the waves go out into space, into the vacant interstellar spaces.
00:18:50.500
And that somehow that death of the language achieves a cosmic context in which it floats ghostly out there.
00:19:02.500
And you never know if in some other world or in some future time there might not be some way in which there can be a reanimation.
00:19:11.500
Do you remember Emily Dickinson's poem, "A Word Is Dead" when it is said, "I say it just begins to live that day"?
00:19:21.500
I mean you start thinking about some of the most crucial fundamental things to who we are when you think about language or going silence.
00:19:32.500
What is the nature of silence? John Burgess said, "Silence is like a hand extended."
00:19:38.500
And it is in a way and you want to grab that hand to shake that hand.
00:19:45.500
But I think some of those hands extended, they vanish.
00:19:51.500
And so at least if we know that, we become less provincial ourselves.
00:19:58.500
Because what happens other than the disappearance of them, something disappears in us.
00:20:07.500
This raises a question of the relationship between language and death which is highly fraught philosophical discussion.
00:20:16.500
Heidegger being one of the philosophers who suggests that if human beings did not were not thrown into their death as a ultimate possibility of their being, they could not speak.
00:20:33.500
And therefore language as a house of being is a direct function of our mortality.
00:20:39.500
A mortality which we make our own before we actually get to the moment of extinction.
00:20:45.500
Heidegger makes a distinction between when a life comes to an end, when it is terminated, that is a kind of death in the biological sense and the literal sense.
00:20:54.500
But that death as an animating force of language is something that we have already incorporated into our way of being in the world and into our speaking.
00:21:04.500
So it makes it all the more pathos written when a language which is inhabited by death almost by definition actually goes extinct.
00:21:16.500
Because it is a very human mode of being in the world specific to that language that is disappearing.
00:21:25.500
So I am not so bothered that language is die because I think they are born of death as much as they are prey to death.
00:21:35.500
It is the whole phenomenon of extinction which is a little bit different.
00:21:41.500
Yes, that is right. And of course some people ask our language is being born and they are interestingly languages born.
00:21:51.500
Every Pentecostal church will be a house of new language every service, apparently in prisons.
00:21:59.500
Prisoners constantly come up with new languages in order to avoid the surveillance of the guards.
00:22:06.500
And they die the moment almost that they are born.
00:22:12.500
And the thing about language as a tool of communication for a culture, for a community of people,
00:22:20.500
there is a thing that I am not sure that I am comfortable with the fact that we should be comfortable with it, with the mass extinction.
00:22:33.500
And I am very frequently asked the question, well, is it possible to revitalize it?
00:22:39.500
And they are actually quite a few projects of revitalization.
00:22:43.500
The one project that worked was Gaelic.
00:22:47.500
And it is a fascinating case. It also puts into relief the political nature of language and language extinction.
00:22:59.500
So after the Irish troubles one of the most important settlements was that Gaelic had to be taught in schools and had to become a second language.
00:23:08.500
In other words, Ireland became a bilingual country.
00:23:12.500
And what is fascinating is that a whole generation, let's say, of the people that are now in their 50s and 60s, very few speak Gaelic.
00:23:23.500
Their parents speak Gaelic. Their children speak Gaelic, but not them.
00:23:28.500
And they are the ones that are sort of an ominous sign of what would have happened to Gaelic.
00:23:33.500
And what is also fascinating is that now we have a science zinn.
00:23:39.500
It is very highly beneficial to be bilingual.
00:23:43.500
So people who have become bilingual not only have they regained their connection to the root and historical and cultural root of their culture, which arguably is important.
00:23:54.500
But they also have more robust intellect.
00:23:58.500
We are neurologically better wired if we speak at least a couple of languages.
00:24:04.500
So actually, benefits are all around.
00:24:07.500
The way that it occurred, the way that it happened was a political decision.
00:24:13.500
There was a political will attached to revitalization of that language.
00:24:19.500
As a matter of fact, UNESCO just declared 2019 the year of indigenous language.
00:24:27.500
Well, Gaelic is one of the lucky languages that survived the Roman conquests.
00:24:32.500
Not only that, but it was also 800 years illegal to speak Gaelic while it was part of the British Empire.
00:24:39.500
But it's estimated that one of the great, great extinctions of human language diversity occurred during,
00:24:47.500
as a result of the Roman imperial conquests of all these various territories.
00:24:52.500
Thousands of languages did not survive the way Gaelic just barely managed to survive.
00:24:58.500
That's right. Globalization, wars, climate change.
00:25:02.500
Right.
00:25:03.500
And all is brilliant for moving of capital.
00:25:07.500
It's flattened out cultural diversity.
00:25:11.500
And I'm not talking about some sort of a pseudo-moral posture that I'm talking about genuine impoverishment, cultural, and power.
00:25:19.500
Well, there are these vast cultural eras of dispersion and then unification of the world.
00:25:30.500
Yeah.
00:25:31.500
And it seems to be an ebb and flow.
00:25:34.500
And we are definitely in a moment of convergence rather than divergence.
00:25:40.500
Yeah.
00:25:41.500
And therefore a reduction of diversity.
00:25:43.500
That's right.
00:25:44.500
Increasing of how much in theization I'm thinking also of dialects.
00:25:47.500
This is not something that you addressed necessarily in last whispers, but anyone in a country like Italy, for example.
00:25:55.500
We know that the disappearance of local dialects is another, it's not only comparable.
00:26:01.500
And it's exactly the same sort of phenomenon because although a dialect is not a distinct language, the language would categorize it.
00:26:10.500
Well, Max Van Wert said that a language is a dialect with an army and an navy.
00:26:16.500
There we go.
00:26:17.500
So there's actually another disputed territories.
00:26:22.500
What defines dialect from language.
00:26:25.500
There's not really complete agreement on that.
00:26:28.500
But yes, of course.
00:26:29.500
Because having grown up in Rome and spending a lot of time there's still, I no longer hear Romanaccio.
00:26:38.500
Romanaccio is a kind of Roman, it's an accent, not so much a dialect, but it's a way of speaking Italian that's completely distinct to latsio, especially in Rome.
00:26:49.500
And it's gone.
00:26:51.500
It's an ebb ironic.
00:26:54.500
Yeah, and it's the empire has erased the dialects, including its own after a while.
00:27:01.500
That's right.
00:27:02.500
That's right.
00:27:03.500
And it has to do with, as you say, transmission.
00:27:07.500
Yeah.
00:27:08.500
When the transmission is blocked, when television standardizes a particular language like French or Italian, German, everyone ends up buying into the dominant hegemonic version of the
00:27:22.500
language.
00:27:23.500
And so I think our listeners are probably very curious to get a sense of what your installation, what sort of sounds you brought into it.
00:27:37.500
Yeah.
00:27:38.500
And have a little taste of that, although they can't see it because it actually has a very powerful visual component to the audio tracks, but we can at least give them a taste of things.
00:27:51.500
Yeah.
00:27:52.500
And before we play it, I want to mention that the way that we have designed the sound, and it was a sound designed in a composition, the oratorius chord, was we created a nine-channel octophonic master.
00:28:12.500
And we didn't do it just to be technical and to savvy, but we wanted to evoke presence in order to articulate the absence.
00:28:24.500
And so what, when you actually are in the space of the installation itself, your mind neurologically registers these voices as present.
00:28:34.500
It doesn't register them as flattened the way you would hear, for example, now from the radio transmission or over, you know, computer or CD, but you still can hear what I see the beauty and the mysterious sort of nature of these languages, chance, in
00:28:57.500
the people, in the world. So, you're too composers, were they also responsible for the mix because with nine channels it's a tremendous job of mixing.
00:29:07.500
That's right.
00:29:08.500
And actually, in the beginning when we were doing that, in the studio, originally we didn't really quite know how it would sound, we knew it intellectually, but then finally, when we heard it, we were kind of stunned ourselves that that worked, the way it worked.
00:29:26.500
It really is underestimated how sound registers in our brain.
00:29:35.500
So anyway, yes, Marco Capalbo, who is also a filmmaker and a composer made recently a documentary on Stravinsky, he did aura, this sort of part of the auditorium, which is elucidating disjunction of the
00:29:56.300
dislocation and disappearance. And Mark Mangini, by the way, an Oscar-winning sound designer, who just recently did Blade Runner, 2049, and before that Mad Max, he wrote, he was more like a Raman enough.
00:30:14.300
And he took all the areas in songs that I have preselected in this kind of loving embrace.
00:30:24.300
And let's hear one, in Korean, it's track number two.
00:30:30.300
Okay. And I'm too illustrated.
00:30:33.300
Obviously alerting our artists anders, what they're going to be hearing is a reduced compressed file in MP3 form that gets podcast over.
00:30:43.300
iTunes or on our website. And that's a very different thing in that theory.
00:30:49.300
But you will still get the sense. And what you will hear is in-grain language, it's on Russian territory, but it's more related to finish than in your language. And it's extinct.
00:31:03.300
And you grew up not too far from where this language was being spoken, right?
00:31:08.300
Yeah.
00:31:09.300
Did you ever hear it spoken yourself? No. No, no, no.
00:31:14.300
And we got a courtesy of E-Lar, Sose University of London, and a Korean Institute of Language and Literature in Russia.
00:31:22.300
[singing in Korean]
00:31:32.300
[singing in Korean]
00:31:36.300
[singing in Korean]
00:31:40.300
[singing in Korean]
00:31:50.300
[singing in Korean]
00:32:09.300
[Music]
00:32:20.100
[Music]
00:32:30.100
[Music]
00:32:40.100
[Music]
00:32:50.100
[Music]
00:33:00.100
[Music]
00:33:10.100
[Music]
00:33:20.100
[Music]
00:33:30.100
[Music]
00:33:40.100
[Music]
00:33:50.100
[Music]
00:34:00.100
[Music]
00:34:10.100
[Music]
00:34:14.100
It's also the choice of choosing a chant rather than the spoken use of a language, a dead language, or a
00:34:24.100
language, but it doesn't need a language, it doesn't need a semantics to communicate what it's
00:34:48.100
what it's conveying.
00:34:50.100
[Music]
00:35:00.100
[Music]
00:35:10.100
And he makes a case that's quite compelling that the first impulses of language were not, there were
00:35:20.100
no consonants and there were no words and that whatever was communicated was communicated
00:35:26.100
surely through the vowel sounds of melody and that he assumed that at least in the southern
00:35:33.940
hemisphere the content of these preverbal melodies would have been "emm-wa" love me or it's a love
00:35:42.900
song.
00:35:43.900
And he says that if you hear something that is a love song, if you don't understand the language
00:35:48.100
at all you still understand what the emotion.
00:35:51.460
Yeah, that's not true by the way that we know that this is true.
00:35:56.260
As a matter of fact, you know it's very frequent that some of the greatest thinkers
00:36:01.780
thought about language and were in completely wrong treasure and still it's fascinating to read
00:36:07.060
about it one of the most illuminating things in the subject is completely of base in terms of fact
00:36:14.900
is an essay by Ezra Pound on Findilosa on the Chinese character.
00:36:22.020
It's a very short essay.
00:36:23.620
It turns out he was completely wrong about it, but what he wanted to install was the action.
00:36:31.940
In the Chinese character and he essentially wrote one of the most poetic things of an aspiration
00:36:39.860
for a language Ezra Pound.
00:36:41.700
It turns out he was completely wrong about Chinese character and about Findilosa but never mind.
00:36:45.540
It reveals when we think about language about this house of being who a review who we are.
00:36:53.380
But I guess if I hear that chant and I don't understand the semantics of what she's saying,
00:37:01.300
it's a bit like rock music where you don't often understand what the words are.
00:37:08.020
Oh, you don't need to understand.
00:37:09.300
You don't need to understand it at the same time.
00:37:11.300
And there's a band, a British band called Portishead, a contemporary band we play that song on the exit.
00:37:17.860
It sounds very much like Portishead where the lead female singer, you don't really understand
00:37:25.540
the words, but there's this pathos that is very, very convergent with what we're hearing there.
00:37:31.860
Well, sometimes when you know it does add a bit to it or quite a bit to it.
00:37:39.460
Like for example, the next track I would like us to play, a home is from India.
00:37:45.380
And the last speaker, Tillishwa Mohan, collected by Stephen Mori of the Pacific and
00:37:52.660
Regional Archive for Digital Resources called Paradisiac.
00:37:56.100
That song, a home, that in a home language is called recalling the spirits.
00:38:03.940
And it refers to the legend or myth that spirits are better than us.
00:38:12.660
These, they are tenderhearted and they do not like the sight of human cruelty so they flee
00:38:18.660
after a war. In a home, you sing that song to recall the spirits.
00:38:24.900
In the video installation, you see the songs words, the lyrics scroll over the screen.
00:38:38.660
And it does, I think, make it deeper and more interesting to know that this song is recalling the
00:38:48.260
spirits, begging them to come back. And in fact, music has that special power to call the spirits.
00:38:55.620
It's a medium of communion with the spirit world from the very beginning.
00:39:00.740
We know that there's a beautiful movie called "Tulematandi Mohan."
00:39:05.140
And I have to mention this because it's about a 17th century French composer.
00:39:10.180
And it begins with his disciple long after the death of the Saint Colomb was the composer.
00:39:17.780
And they're playing in the court of the king. And he stops everyone. He says,
00:39:24.980
"Shaknottwafiniramuha." Every note has to finish with it in a dying,
00:39:32.980
ramuha dying. So the note has to die because through that interplay between sound and silence that
00:39:42.260
music articulates, the spirit world can actually be contacted. And in fact, his master, Saint Colomb,
00:39:51.940
after the death of his wife, composed all these beautiful lamentful songs which were his form of
00:39:59.300
maintaining converse and contact with his dead wife across that threshold. So this song that we're
00:40:07.220
going to hear is a kind of version of that special magical power that music has to
00:40:11.860
recall the spirits. We call the spirits and cross the special. So here we go.
00:40:16.420
[singing]
00:40:18.420
[singing]
00:40:20.420
[singing]
00:40:22.420
[singing]
00:40:24.420
[singing]
00:40:26.420
[singing]
00:40:28.420
[singing]
00:40:30.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:40:33.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:40:57.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:41:01.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:41:05.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:41:09.420
[singing in foreign language]
00:41:13.420
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:17.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:21.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:25.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:29.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:33.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:37.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:41.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:45.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:49.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:53.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:41:59.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:42:05.220
(singing in foreign language)
00:42:18.080
- Yeah, struck me that along with the loss of a language
00:42:20.680
like that, there's also the loss of that
00:42:24.100
the incantational power to contact the spirit world.
00:42:28.300
- Yeah.
00:42:29.700
- Are languages are not used to that purpose
00:42:32.540
very much these days.
00:42:34.060
- Right.
00:42:35.880
- And is this the scene, I remember it as with the man
00:42:40.020
in the desert, right?
00:42:41.160
- It's a mirage.
00:42:42.140
- It's a mirage, and it's that figure shimmering.
00:42:47.980
- For the whole two and a half minutes that this chant
00:42:51.840
takes place on.
00:42:52.680
- That's right, and then over the figure you see the lyrics
00:42:55.440
of the song which actually I found the script extraordinarily
00:42:59.680
beautiful.
00:43:00.760
- Do we know what it says?
00:43:01.760
- That's called, it says the lyrics of the song.
00:43:04.800
We do know exactly what it says.
00:43:06.600
It's asking the spirits, please come back to the sland,
00:43:10.120
the land that is deserted now, that we're done with being bad.
00:43:17.000
- Yeah.
00:43:17.840
- Come back.
00:43:18.660
- Well, let's hold on to that one for a long time
00:43:20.640
because there's gonna come a time where we're gonna have
00:43:23.080
to call the spirits back because it's unlikely that
00:43:26.280
under our present circumstances they're gonna be coming
00:43:28.480
back anytime soon.
00:43:29.640
- Unfortunately, yeah.
00:43:31.240
I know.
00:43:32.080
- So I can't resist asking about the role that the forest
00:43:36.080
plays in this whole or atorio.
00:43:40.040
Because there's, I think at the beginning of the film
00:43:44.840
there's something that looks like a cosmic space
00:43:49.560
that actually then enlarges with lights
00:43:52.720
and it turns out to be the inner circles
00:43:55.760
of the trunk of a tree.
00:43:57.320
- Yes.
00:43:58.800
- And then there's a long segment later in the film
00:44:02.000
where a roving camera just drifts through a forest.
00:44:06.360
- Yeah, it's a drone, it's filmed with a drone.
00:44:09.960
But the first one is actually, let's play the overture
00:44:14.960
because I wanted to mention about Echau in us
00:44:22.080
from hearing others.
00:44:25.920
When I was a child, I had this experience
00:44:30.160
when I well decided to look for God
00:44:32.960
when I was six years old.
00:44:34.640
And I went to church because that's called address
00:44:39.480
and I looked for him there.
00:44:43.680
And then I heard the sound of the bell
00:44:45.920
and it was the sound of a Russian bell.
00:44:48.800
And since Russia is enormous,
00:44:50.760
you had to use lower decibel sounds
00:44:54.280
in order for oil to carry long distances.
00:44:58.120
So it's the way you experience sound in a disco
00:45:02.000
with reverberates through your entire body.
00:45:04.600
And I ran back to my father and I said,
00:45:08.640
Papa, I found God.
00:45:10.800
And he's an atheist and a scientist.
00:45:13.600
And he looked at me and he said,
00:45:16.960
well, where did you find him?
00:45:18.720
And I said, in my ribs, I found him in my ribs.
00:45:22.320
And he said, oh, that's perfect.
00:45:24.400
But the way that he looked at me in the way
00:45:26.360
that it sounded, I said, well, something is up, something
00:45:28.640
isn't right.
00:45:30.600
So I went back again to hear the bell
00:45:34.080
and then I realized it's the bell.
00:45:36.560
And when I realized it, not only did they lose God,
00:45:40.920
I actually had this thrill, that this is possible,
00:45:44.960
that you can communicate to another human being
00:45:49.840
in such a way that it reverberates
00:45:52.280
through your whole being.
00:45:54.760
So our rotorial begins with the bell.
00:45:58.280
And of course also bells have these meanings
00:46:02.840
of a funeral or a danger where you told the bell.
00:46:09.840
And you hear the bells throughout the rotorial.
00:46:14.720
And that's what opens it.
00:46:16.720
And it's in a way that would also be
00:46:18.720
for the fanatical, is it?
00:46:21.040
So let's hear over it.
00:46:24.680
Are we going to find God?
00:46:27.120
We'll see.
00:46:27.720
By the way, I--
00:46:29.120
The point is to look.
00:46:32.000
Let me go ahead and say this.
00:46:33.360
If God is present, He's present everywhere, I think.
00:46:36.920
You don't go and find Him in some hidden place.
00:46:38.920
But what--
00:46:40.440
You sound like a preacher.
00:46:41.640
Mm, I'm not sure about that.
00:46:43.760
[LAUGHTER]
00:46:45.720
Let's give a listen to the overture.
00:46:47.880
By my cup, elbow.
00:46:49.680
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:46:53.280
[APPLAUSE]
00:47:11.280
[APPLAUSE]
00:47:21.280
[APPLAUSE]
00:47:25.280
[APPLAUSE]
00:47:29.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:33.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:37.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:41.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:45.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:49.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:53.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:47:57.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:01.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:05.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:09.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:13.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:17.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:21.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:25.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:29.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:31.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:33.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:35.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:37.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:39.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:41.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:43.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:45.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:49.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:53.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:48:57.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:49:01.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:49:05.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:49:13.280
So in between the two bells, what you heard were four languages.
00:49:17.280
The Selkam honor language from Argentina,
00:49:20.280
in green, without their accompaniment, from Russia,
00:49:24.280
I knew language from Japan and Bataari language from Oman.
00:49:28.280
And those were Cautes here of Sose University of London,
00:49:31.280
Carillion Institute of Language Literature and History of
00:49:35.280
the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Folkway
00:49:38.280
Recordings.
00:49:39.280
So, but to go back to your question about the forest,
00:49:44.280
let me remind something you wrote, Robert.
00:49:47.280
But why should forests haunt the mind
00:49:50.280
like some mystical dream or nightmare that every now and then
00:49:55.280
spreads its long, pre-historical shadows over the ordinary
00:49:59.280
clarity of things modern?
00:50:01.280
They are mysterious to us in so many ways,
00:50:08.280
as the languages we don't understand are.
00:50:12.280
And I have never really been comfortable with the metaphor
00:50:17.280
of a language tree.
00:50:19.280
I think it's more of a forest of languages.
00:50:23.280
And so that seemed like an appropriate metaphor
00:50:26.280
to fly through the forest and languages and be surrounded by them.
00:50:32.280
The way that we sometimes expect,
00:50:34.280
and somehow our pre-tenatural, almost prehistoric level,
00:50:38.280
we feel it in our DNA when we walk through a forest that we hear voices.
00:50:43.280
Absolutely.
00:50:46.280
One thing about the forest, even phenomenologically,
00:50:49.280
and I believe Claude Levy's host says this somewhere in his book,
00:50:54.280
he's topique when he went down to Brazil into the tropical forest.
00:51:00.280
He said that when you enter a forest like that,
00:51:05.280
a thick dense forest, your sense of sight
00:51:11.280
becomes altogether secondary.
00:51:14.280
And you don't see all that much because of the dappled light
00:51:18.280
and the darkness, but the sounds are accentuated.
00:51:24.280
Yeah, you become a deer or a wolf.
00:51:26.280
Yes, and there's a depth, all of a sudden there's a depth into the sounds
00:51:31.280
that you cannot imagine outside of the forest,
00:51:34.280
because it's a forest that creates the reverberation and resonance.
00:51:39.280
And that effect that you were talking about about the low decibels
00:51:43.280
and the base sound of a bell and Russia.
00:51:47.280
Yeah.
00:51:48.280
So you learn to listen more than to see.
00:51:52.280
And that's when I was watching your oratorio,
00:51:56.280
like everyone who was present at that screening at first,
00:52:00.280
I was, we're so, there's such scope of elia in our western culture
00:52:05.280
that everyone's transfixed to what's happening on the screen visually.
00:52:09.280
Yeah.
00:52:10.280
And then it struck me that actually it's the primary place
00:52:16.280
where the communication is taking place is in the audio.
00:52:20.280
That's right.
00:52:21.280
And we as a matter of effect created the work this way.
00:52:24.280
So first, I selected the, from thousands and thousands of recordings,
00:52:29.280
I selected a more narrow source library from which we then worked.
00:52:34.280
And then once we came up with the sounds and first sketches,
00:52:42.280
that's when we started to film.
00:52:45.280
And the flight through the forest, especially in conversation and in order,
00:52:50.280
was really while we were choreographing with earphones,
00:52:55.280
we were choreographing the drone flight with the earphones on and hearing the oratorio
00:53:01.280
as it was evolving.
00:53:03.280
Let's hear the conversation because there you hear really the spoken word.
00:53:09.280
And in the beginning, what you hear actually interwelcher,
00:53:13.280
an extinct language from Argentina, is the only origins myths that we decided to use.
00:53:20.280
We didn't have actually that many because these are difficult to articulate the origins myths.
00:53:26.280
And a lot of the times within extinct or endangered languages,
00:53:29.280
you're lucky enough to get through a dictionary.
00:53:31.280
Let alone something so profound and philosophical.
00:53:34.280
But here we have it.
00:53:36.280
And that is, it goes that all ancient human beings were first birds.
00:53:42.280
They were ducks, flamingos and swans.
00:53:46.280
And then from the quelcher,
00:53:48.280
they were, we created it in such a way, we strung the recordings from different places in the world.
00:53:55.280
The quelcher from Argentina,
00:53:57.280
Nivvoch from Russia, Nafsan, South Eufthait from Vanuatu,
00:54:02.280
Nahuatl from Mexico, I know from Japan,
00:54:05.280
and Joachan from Namibia, Surrel from Nepal, and King from South Africa,
00:54:11.280
Anungata, Ayolohorhatul Mictek from Mexico,
00:54:15.280
Sadu from China, Chama Kokko from Paraguay and Caket from Papua New Guinea.
00:54:21.280
Let's listen to conversation.
00:54:24.280
Oh, that's a course of the bits.
00:54:27.280
Will it be until now? It's just, it must be.
00:54:30.280
What will happen? I will call, I will be over my place, King of the South.
00:54:35.280
[Music]
00:54:55.280
[Music]
00:55:00.280
[Music]
00:55:05.280
[Music]
00:55:11.280
[Music]
00:55:15.280
[Music]
00:55:19.280
[Music]
00:55:29.280
[Music]
00:55:39.280
[Music]
00:55:49.280
[Music]
00:55:55.280
[Music]
00:55:59.280
[Music]
00:56:05.280
[Music]
00:56:25.280
[Music]
00:56:33.280
[Music]
00:56:43.280
[Music]
00:56:53.280
[Music]
00:56:59.280
[Music]
00:57:09.280
[Music]
00:57:19.280
[Music]
00:57:29.280
[Music]
00:57:39.280
[Music]
00:57:47.280
[Music]
00:57:57.280
[Music]
00:58:07.280
[Music]
00:58:15.280
[Music]
00:58:25.280
[Music]
00:58:29.280
[Music]
00:58:35.280
[Music]
00:58:45.280
[Music]
00:58:55.280
[Music]
00:59:01.280
[Music]
00:59:11.280
[Music]
00:59:21.280
[Music]
00:59:31.280
[Music]
00:59:41.280
[Music]
00:59:49.280
[Music]
00:59:59.280
[Music]
01:00:09.280
[Music]
01:00:19.280
[Music]
01:00:29.280
[Music]
01:00:39.280
[Music]
01:00:49.280
[Music]
01:00:59.280
[Music]
01:01:03.280
[Music]
01:01:09.280
[Music]
01:01:19.280
[Music]
01:01:23.280
[Music]
01:01:33.280
[Music]
01:01:35.280
[Music]
01:01:37.280
[Music]
01:01:43.280
[Music]
01:01:53.280
[Music]
01:01:55.280
[Music]
01:01:57.280
[Music]
01:01:59.280
[Music]
01:02:03.280
[Music]
01:02:13.280
[Music]
01:02:15.280
[Music]
01:02:19.280
[Music]
01:02:29.280
[Music]
01:02:31.280
[Music]
01:02:35.280
[Music]
01:02:51.280
[Music]
01:03:11.280
[Music]
01:03:31.280
[Music]
01:03:41.280
[Music]
01:03:51.280
[Music]
01:04:01.280
[Music]
01:04:11.280
[Music]
01:04:21.280
[Music]
01:04:31.280
[Music]
01:04:41.280
[Music]
01:04:51.280
[Music]
01:05:01.280
[Music]
01:05:11.280
[Music]
01:05:21.280
[Music]
01:05:31.280
[Music]
01:05:41.280
[Music]
01:05:51.280
[Music]
01:06:01.280
[Music]
01:06:11.280
[Music]
01:06:21.280
[Music]
01:06:23.280
[Music]
01:06:27.280
[Music]
01:06:37.280
[Music]
01:06:39.280
[Music]
01:06:43.280
[Music]
01:06:59.280
[Music]
01:07:19.280
[Music]
01:07:39.280
[Music]
01:07:59.280
[Music]
01:08:09.280
[Music]
01:08:13.280
[Music]
01:08:19.280
[Music]
01:08:39.280
[Music]
01:08:59.280
[Music]
01:09:19.280
[Music]
01:09:39.280
[Music]
01:09:49.280
[Music]
01:10:09.280
[Music]
01:10:29.280
[Music]
01:10:49.280
[Music]
01:10:59.280
[Music]
01:11:19.280
[Music]
01:11:29.280
[Music]
01:11:49.280
[Music]
01:12:09.280
[Music]
01:12:29.280
[Music]
01:12:39.280
[Music]
01:12:49.280
[Music]
01:12:59.280
[Music]
01:13:09.280
[Music]
01:13:19.280
[Music]
01:13:29.280
[Music]
01:13:39.280
[Music]
01:13:49.280
[Music]
01:13:59.280
[Music]
01:14:09.280
[Music]
01:14:19.280
[Music]
01:14:39.280
[Music]
01:14:49.280
[Music]
01:14:59.280
[Music]
01:15:09.280
[Music]
01:15:29.280
[Music]
01:15:49.280
[Music]
01:15:59.280
[Music]
01:16:09.280
[Music]
01:16:19.280
[Music]
01:16:39.280
[Music]
01:16:49.280
[Music]
01:16:59.280
[Music]
01:17:09.280
[Music]
01:17:19.280
[Music]
01:17:29.280
[Music]
01:17:33.280
[Music]
01:17:53.280
[Music]
01:18:13.280
[Music]
01:18:33.280
[Music]
01:18:53.280
[Music]
01:19:03.280
[Music]
01:19:13.280
[Music]
01:19:23.280
[Music]
01:19:33.280
[Music]
01:19:43.280
[Music]
01:19:53.280
[Music]
01:20:03.280
[Music]
01:20:13.280
[Music]
01:20:23.280
[Music]
01:20:43.280
[Music]
01:20:53.280
[Music]
01:21:03.280
[Music]
01:21:13.280
[Music]
01:21:23.280
[Music]
01:21:33.280
[Music]
01:21:43.280
[Music]
01:21:53.280
[Music]
01:22:03.280
[Music]
01:22:13.280
[Music]
01:22:23.280
[Music]
01:22:33.280
[Music]
01:22:43.280
[Music]
01:22:53.280
[Music]
01:23:03.280
[Music]