Image of passing language

In project called IMAGE OF PASSING LANGUAGE I combined my two greatest passions: INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION and PHOTOGRAPHY.


The aim of the project is to capture with a photocamera death of critically and severaly endangered ethnic languages of Russia. Many lexical units of those linguistic minorities are deeply embedded in the culture of nation. They are untranslatable. They embody a combination of distinctive concepts. The thing that inspired me a lot to create this idea was an article of Russ Rymer Vanishing Voices (National Geographic Magazine, July 2012). In his work Rymer pointed out that: One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear. He gave an example of the word of Tuvan: khoj özeeri, the method of killing a sheep. If slaughtering livestock can be seen as a part of humans’ closeness to animals, khoj özeeri represents an unusually intimate version. Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead. In the language of Tuvan people, khoj özeeri means not only slaughter but also kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat and making sausage with the saved blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole thing can be accomplished in two hours (as the Mongushes did this morning) in one’s good clothes without spilling a drop of blood. Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character he wrote. I started my research from looking through the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. It gave me an information that in Russia there are 131 languages, which are either dead or are under a direct threat of going silent. I started to reduce the amount of speakers in a browser gap. It lead me eventually to a frightening eyeopener. When I put there an amount of 20, it turned out, that paradoxically there are more languages (31 to be precise) spoken by this rough number than speakers themselves. This verbal phenomenon (a word known to none without equivalent) I want to contextualize as a separate culture value of exact ethnicity. With these photography series I would like to show the entire panoply of senses. For me, a photocamera is an instrument, which is, unlike translation, able to demonstrate semiotic spectrum of word. Interaction with people is my target, too. I wish I could go there with a car fitted with darkoom. This could make a use of all photography knowledge I gathered (using ambrotype and analogue techniques) and share it with ethnical groups far from civilisation.