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The images and sounds of Wynne’s Anspayaxw hang in the border zones between anthropology and art, drawing attention to the subjective nature of language documentation and photography, and the multiple layers of translation that are central to the documentation and interpretation process. It is Wynne’s navigation of this border space between disciplinary practices that is most unsettling about the work. The sounds and images, the products of ethnographic and linguistic research, are edited and remixed to resist easy interpretation. Reality, Wynne suggests, is never symmetrical. This is a quality that the doubled images are intended to reflect. The imperfect reflections counter the viewer’s desire for symmetry; they disrupt the sense that what is seen and heard can be simply understood. Relations of power are rarely symmetrical either, but there are spaces of negotiation in between.
Kate Hennessy (excerpt from 'Asymmetrical Translations: John Wynne’s Anspayaxw')
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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 next pupil 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 are filtered, stretched and resonated, but no other sounds have been added.
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Click the image below for a 360 degree VR panorama of the installation.
Use your mouse to navigate left and right. Shift key zooms in, Control zooms out.
If you do not have QuickTime installed, download it free.
The panels you see above are both photographs and speakers. The bigger ones are 2 metres wide, and each panel plays an independent channel of sound.
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Click above for two audio excerpts available on the Border Zones site
Interview with Stephen Quinn on CBC Radio's On the Coast
Interview with Paolo Petropaolo on CBC Radio's North by Northwest
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This work is dedicated to the memory of Doreen Jensen (Ha'hl Yee), artist and project participant (1933-2009).
Special thanks to
Barbara Harris for introducing me to her language, to her community and to my collaborator, linguist Tyler Peterson.
Thanks also to Karen Duffek,
Denise Hawrysio, Tyler Peterson, Chris Rolfe, The Weget family, Louise Wilson, John and Helen Heit and the community of Kispiox,
in particular those with whom we worked.
The project was funded by an ELDP Fieldtrip grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at SOAS and a production grant from the Canada Council for the Arts,
with additional in-kind support from Amina Technologies, London College of Communication and the UBC Museum of Anthropology.
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