Anspayaxw (Kispiox) is a small reserve in northern British Columbia where I worked with linguist Tyler Peterson and visual artist Denise Hawrysio to record and photograph members of the Gitxsan community. Their native language, Gitxsanimaax, is one of many seriously endangered languages on the west coast of Canada, an area of remarkable but dwindling linguistic diversity. There are roughly 400 ‘competent’ speakers of Gitxsanimaax, but most of these are middle-aged or older and their average age is rising.
Several of the people featured in this installation managed to learn Gitxsanimaax as children despite attending residential schools where its use was forbidden. Such suppression of language by colonizing powers is far from rare: during the 18th and 19th centuries, children caught speaking their native tongue in Welsh schools were forced to wear a block of wood called the Welsh Not, which the wearer would pass on to the nextpupil heard speaking the language until, at the end of the day or week, the unfortunate child in possession of it would be struck with it.
Language is a primary repository of culture and history, and once a language is no longer spoken, the rich knowledge it carries is gone forever. The linguistic diversity of the world is under threat: there are currently about 6,000 languages spoken now but it is variously estimated that between 50 and 90% of these will be gone by the end of this century.
The word Anspayaxw ends with a ‘voiceless fricative’, a breathy sound characteristic of the language which influenced the way I have worked with the environmental sounds. All the sounds in the piece are derived from the participants’ voices and recordings I made in and around Kispiox. Sometimes, these sounds arefiltered, stretched and resonated, but no other sounds have been added.
Sound & photography installation
All rights reserved, John Wynne
[Bio c. 2012] John Wynne is a Canadian artist based in London (UK) whose practice includes large-scale multi-channel sound installations for galleries and public spaces, delicate sound sculptures, flying radios and award-winning ‘composed documentaries’ for radio which hover on the boundary between documentation and abstraction. His massive installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner became the first work of sound art in the Saatchi collection in London and won him the 2010 British Composer Award for Sonic Art. His work with endangered languages includes a project with click languages in the Kalahari Desert and another with one of...
Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence. They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labour of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to. Audible Observatories brings together works that draw attention to both the situation and the agency of the observer. The curators for Audible Observatories make a playful connection between research-based art and place-bound exhibition in order to animate a curatorial vision that foregrounds audio-centric art works within a broader rubric of site-specificity. We conceptualize the audible observatory as either a mobile or a stationary...