Susan Hiller

Tallahassee, 1940. Live in Londres

The artist dialogues with the historical legacy of minimalism and conceptual art in formalizing her works, which are produced in a variety of mediums, such as installation, video and photography. Susan Hiller frequently avails of such strategies as inventory, translation and archeology in dealing with culture and invisibility.

At Frestas, she will be presenting the series The Last Silent Movie (2007-2008), which consists of a film and 24 etchings on paper. On a dark screen, voiceovers speak dead languages about to disappear once and for all from this earth, while the engravings visually translate the sound waves of those dialects into oscilloscopes.

While we hear some of the last surviving speakers of these endangered languages, English subtitles translate their content, giving us the chance to decipher aspects of these cultural communities through oral discourse about their everyday lives.

The work raises a number of questions: how much memory and history will be lost with those tongues? What is the socioeconomic context that determines which cultures prevail and which go extinct? Instead of a rigorous inventory, it’s a sensitive relationship we forge with these languages, mediated by the physical sensation of hearing them spoken in a darkened room.

[L.B.]