Susan Hiller, Last Silent Move 2007/8 (depending on which of the below sites you visit (susanhiller.org or artreview.com)
Video courtesy of Art Review and Timothy Taylor Galleyvia http://www.artreview.com/video/video/show?id=1474022%3AVideo%3A333692
SL: You have made several works in which objects are presented as events, or traces of events, such as the recordings of 'dead' languages in The Last Silent Movie (2007) or the 41 photographs of memorials that form part of Monument (1980-81). These recordings, relics and inscriptions, speak, as you have said, from beyond the grave - they are both sculptural (existing in space) and performative (existing in time, as an event, and thereafter as a memory). Are you interested in a more cyclical, rather than linear, conception of time?
SH: I am interested in Walter Benjamin's idea that history - the past - only exists in the present moment, as it speaks to us now. The ideas in the memorial plaques, for example, the ones I used in Monument - of heroism, civilian heroism - those ideas aren't just particular to that period. They are relevant to us now for many reasons or I wouldn't have been interested in them.
My interest in disappearing languages is similar, since our society is also in the process of becoming the past. The Last Silent Movie is on one level a critique of the way that our society fetishes language loss, but not the people who lost the language. In other words, we put the language in an archive but the people die - they die through disease, poverty, they hit the bottom of some social scale in some country or other. Nobody does anything about that - anthropologists don't do anything to actively intervene in anything. But then they collect languages, as though languages were a token of concern or something of the sort. Then they put them in an archive which no one else is allowed to use - I had to find devious ways to get those samples in my piece. Because if you're locked out, then everyone is locked out of those archives - it's peculiar, isn't it?
--Excerpt taken from interview between Hiller and Sarah Lowndes for Afterall Online, Artists at Work, published 02.02.2011
SH: I am interested in Walter Benjamin's idea that history - the past - only exists in the present moment, as it speaks to us now. The ideas in the memorial plaques, for example, the ones I used in Monument - of heroism, civilian heroism - those ideas aren't just particular to that period. They are relevant to us now for many reasons or I wouldn't have been interested in them.
My interest in disappearing languages is similar, since our society is also in the process of becoming the past. The Last Silent Movie is on one level a critique of the way that our society fetishes language loss, but not the people who lost the language. In other words, we put the language in an archive but the people die - they die through disease, poverty, they hit the bottom of some social scale in some country or other. Nobody does anything about that - anthropologists don't do anything to actively intervene in anything. But then they collect languages, as though languages were a token of concern or something of the sort. Then they put them in an archive which no one else is allowed to use - I had to find devious ways to get those samples in my piece. Because if you're locked out, then everyone is locked out of those archives - it's peculiar, isn't it?
--Excerpt taken from interview between Hiller and Sarah Lowndes for Afterall Online, Artists at Work, published 02.02.2011
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