Throughout November, artist Susan Hiller’s thought-provoking installation The Last Silent Movie (2007) will be at CAMPLE LINE, on loan from The British Council Collection. It includes a set of 24 etchings and a 22 minute film that features voices speaking in extinct and endangered languages. Some voices sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some, directly or indirectly, accuse us – the listeners – of injustice.
The Last Silent Movie will be part of an on-going programme at CAMPLE called YOUR WORDS MOVE, the starting point for which is an album of world languages compiled in Thornhill in the 1870s by Dr Thomas B Grierson using a donation of language samples from the Bible Society. The album, now in Dumfries Museum, features an extraordinary array of languages from across the globe, many now severely endangered.