On Saturday 20 April at 15.00 you are invited to the Bottega Cini premises in Venice for the booksigning of the volume “Lena Herzog”, published by Skira, and for the opening of the video installation “Last Whispers” by Lena Herzog, who will be present and available to sign copies of the volume.
The event is promoted and organised by the publishing house Skira in collaboration with The Merchant of Venice and the Fondazione Archivio Vittorio Cini.

Last Whispers: Immersive Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree by Lena Herzog, an American photographer and artist, is a project centred on the theme of the mass extinction of languages.
Every two weeks the world loses a language. At an unprecedented rate, greater than that of the extinction of some species, our linguistic diversity – perhaps the most important means of self-knowledge – is being eroded. Today, of the 7,000 surviving languages on Earth, only 30 are used by the majority of the population. It is estimated that at least half of the languages currently spoken will be extinct by the end of the century. Other sources predict even faster disappearance.
In an attempt to raise awareness of this problem, the UN General Assembly and UNESCO declared 2022-2032 the “International Decade of Indigenous Languages”.
Last Whispers is a spatialised sound composition that combines speech, songs, spells and ritual chants with sounds and images of nature and frequencies from outer space. The result is a choral work, at once deeply modern and traditional, dedicated to the theme of the extinction of languages on a global scale. This extinction is, by definition, silent, because silence itself is precisely the form it takes. Last Whispers gives voice to what has been silenced: while we drown in the noise of our own voices – the expression of the dominant cultural and linguistic systems – we are surrounded by a boundless ocean of silence.
The immersive landscape of Last Whispers is an invocation to extinct languages and a spell for those at risk.

For further information

• Lena Herzog