Last Whispers presentation at the UNESCO

by Lena Herzog
November 21st, 2021

November 21st, UNESCO, Paris

Thank you for this honor.

Excellencies – Ministers, Your Highness, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen, Dear colleagues, Friends.

Language is our first creative act, and thus it is the most democratic form of art: we all do language. However, rapidly, we are losing most of them. At an unprecedented speed, faster than the extinction of some species, our linguistic diversity—the very means by which we know ourselves—is eroding. 

Last Whispers is an Immersive Oratorio of extinct and endangered languages. This is a project about a mass extinction. By definition, this extinction occurs in silence, since silence is the very form it takes. Last Whispers premiered at the British Museum in 2016 in The Living & Dying Gallery, its main exit directly facing the Rosetta Stone, the great monument to a dead language and our desire and ability to decipher it as a key to the spectacular culture, in that case, of Ancient Egypt. And yet all the languages dying now are keys to astounding cultures. 

While working on Last Whispers, I listened to thousands of recordings of vanishing languages without knowing what they were saying or singing about. I got addicted to them. They remind me that while we are drowning in the noise of our own voices, nudged here, tugged there, manipulated everywhere, we are floating on an ocean filled with a silence of others.

We are hurtling towards singularity, and a singularity of the most efficient, pervasive form: delivered to us via modern means of communication, continuously, individually and en masse. “Conformism” would be a euphemism to describe it, for it will be streamlining not only of language and culture, but ways of thinking, ways of seeing, ways of understanding and thus, ways of being. It will be a world we would not want to live in.

There must be a way out of it. How do we stop this impoverishment of our collective cultural household? Without self-dealing or posturing, without pretense? How do we make room for this fantastic variousness of how can we make sense of the world and ourselves in it? It takes a profound sense of equality in a profoundly unequal world. Indeed a tall order.

Allocation of resources and political will and a steady continuous dedication does it, as rare examples of revitalization show us. Maybe we begin by listening, at least for little bit.