INTRODUCTION
When a language becomes extinct, it takes more than just its words to a silent grave. With it disappear millennia of culture, knowledge, and tradition. Its unique interpretation of our world unravels and dies.
UNESCO warns us that 90 to 95 percent of our world’s languages will die by the end of this century. And what are our descendants to expect by the end of the next? The UN reports that one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades. And with this ecological catastrophe, humankind will be facing a bleak world, an Armageddon of two or three languages vying for supremacy, moving toward a barren monoculture of one world, in one language.
When I was a child, our village in Corinth spoke a language that no one speaks anymore. Glyuha-ehgurteh, tongue of stone. I would never have thought that a language could die within a generation; and yet it did. I feel the burden of being one of the last speakers in the community, a terminal speaker. It is for me now a silent tongue. I try to keep it alive, talk to myself in half-forgotten phrases, as there is no one else to talk to. And there’s always that worry: If I forget a word, it might never be remembered again.
In my artworks, human figures interact with extinct and lost words from Bronze Age Greece. Amid explosions of color these figures—self-portraits in a way—engage with ancient and forgotten Greek hieroglyphs and logograms that appeared more than a millennium before the Greek alphabet.
In some cases, we know a word’s meaning, but no longer its sound.
In some cases, we know a word’s sound, but no longer its meaning.
In some cases, we know neither its sound nor its meaning, and all that remains are the silent lines and loops of the hieroglyph cut into stone or clay.
Each of my works is an attempt to reach into and fathom a word and hieroglyph lost forever: the extinct ancient words are returning to warn us of many more thousands of language deaths if our governments and communities do not take action.
STATEMENT
In my current series of works I show struggles and interactions between human figures and ancient Greek (pre-Homeric) hieroglyphs; people entangled in lost sounds and words, at times in communion, at times in battle. It is part of my lifelong fascination with the rich linguistic tapestry of Greece, the history of its languages stretching back over the millennia. In some cases we know what the sounds and meanings of the hieroglyphs are—but in most cases we do not. The human figures in my works are all, in their own ways, making contact with these forgotten words and meanings. We are facing a mass language extinction. Gone forever will be their words and their cultures. In my art I reach back through the space of time from our contemporary moment to the pre-alphabet Greek hieroglyphs, seeking what we have lost, and with image and color reconnecting with the forgotten words and languages of my homeland.
BIOGRAPHY
In my current series of works I show struggles and interactions between human figures and ancient Greek (pre-Homeric) hieroglyphs; people entangled in lost sounds and words, at times in communion, at times in battle. It is part of my lifelong fascination with the rich linguistic tapestry of Greece, the history of its languages stretching back over the millennia. In some cases we know what the sounds and meanings of the hieroglyphs are—but in most we do not. The human figures in my works are all, in their own ways, making contact with these forgotten words and meanings. We are facing a mass language extinction. Gone forever will be their words and their cultures. In my art I reach through the space of time, back to the pre-alphabet Greek hieroglyphs, seeking what we have lost, and with image and color reconnecting with the forgotten words and languages of my homeland.