Lost Words Lost Worlds
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Beschreibung
In Lost Words Lost Worlds, artist and literary translator Peter Constantine visually explores the alarming issue of language extinction through artworks he produced in 2022 and 2023. Along with the ecological catastrophe of animal and plant extinction, he warns against an Armageddon of two or three languages vying for supremacy, moving toward a barren monoculture of one world, one language.
In his artworks, human figures interact with extinct and lost words from Bronze Age Greece. There are explosions of color as these figures engage with ancient and forgotten hieroglyphs and logograms that emerged more than a millennium before the 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; all that remains are the silent lines and loops of the hieroglyph cut into stone or clay.
Each of Constantine’s works is an attempt to reach into and fathom a lost meaning. The extinct ancient words are returning to warn us of many more thousand language deaths if we do not take action.
Autor*in
Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine is a mixed-media artist based in New York. He works with stories, images, Greek Bronze Age hieroglyphs, and languages thought to be lost to time. He is among the last speakers of Arberishte, a sister language of medieval Albanian spoken in the villages outside Athens and Corinth where he grew up. Among his subjects are the lost words and sounds of this endangered language and of other forgotten languages of Greece, breathing life into ancient cultures and systems of knowledge that have faced erasure.
Constantine is a literary translator, writer, and activist for a diversified linguistic ecosystem. Among his recent translations into English are works by Augustine, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He has also translated the contemporary poets Jazra Khaleed, Eleni Kefala, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, and Ilse van Staden into German. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN Translation Prize, and the National Translation Award, as well as literary prizes from Kosovo and Greece. He exhibits his work internationally. His series of six stone works on the Finnish epic Kalevala is part of the permanent collection at the State Museum of Urban Sculpture in St. Petersburg. His most recent solo exhibition took place in Manchester in 2024.
He is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut and Publisher of World Poetry Books.
Themen in »Lost Words Lost Worlds«
mixed media art endangered languages language extinction contemporary art