Philomela

Author: Ian Charles Lepine

Year: 2024

Title: Philomela

Technique: Ceramic clay sculpture, painted with pigments

 

According to an article published in National Geographic in 2012, one language disappears roughly every fifteen days1; this means that every year, twenty-four languages disappear from the face of the Earth. If we conceive language as a manifestation of a unique human culture, this forces us to face the daunting fact that humanity is indeed, in a sense, an endangered species, perhaps not as a whole, but in the individual aspects that compose our variety. Since the apparition of this National Geographic article twelve years ago, roughly 288 languages have ceased to resound through the air. There is nothing to do about this but to feel the loss. It is clear that most of these languages never possessed great numbers of speakers, but one needs but turn to history to see that an elevated number of speakers guarantees nothing.

    Languages often outlast empires, but eventually they too must collapse. Few facts are as discombobulating to the human mind than to realise that every single lingua franca up to the present has eventually died. If fortune has blessed it, its carcass can still be decyphered by archaeologists; if not, it has fallen into a darkness that may never be lifted. What does this bode for our own, living lanuages? Shall English disappear? French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese? The Acad.mie Fran.aise, like many such other institutions have but one principal, quixotic goal: to ensure the continuance and survival of a national language. Whether this noble aim shall be accomplished remains to be seen. It shall not be seen by us.

    My piece Philomela crystalises the long-lasting history of human language into the shape of an ancient myth about language in a more personal sense. The story of Philomela appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philomela, whose name means lover of music (of sound, of musical language), is the victim of a dreadful fate. Her sister’s husband, Tereus, inflamed by a terrible lust, rapes her. Philomela vows to tell the world about his crime, though it mean her own ruin, “audiet haec aether et si deus ullus in illo est” she says, i.e. ‘the skies will hear of it, and any god that may be there.’ To prevent this from happening Tereus brutalises her and rips out her tongue, thus taking away her capacity to speak. It is no coincidence that in most languages, the word ‘tongue’ refers both to the organ in the human mouth and to a spoken language. The term language indeed comes into English from the French langue, meaning tongue. It is in fact difficult to find a language in which these two terms aren’t homonyms. The connection between bodily organ and human speech, though undoubtedly with its exceptions, seems almost a universal linguistic fact across cultures.

    In the myth, upon losing her tongue in both terms of the word, Philomela turns to visual art to tell her story and accuse her attacker, and weaves a tapestry that illustrates her dreadful fate. Her sister Procne receives it and they conspire to wreak a terrible revenge upon Tereus. My Philomela has also lost her tongue. In this case it has not been Tereus but Chronos that has ripped it away. Time has destroyed her language, as it has indeed so many others, perhaps as it shall destroy them all. To reflect this fact, throughout the surface of the sculpture one can read the world ‘tongue’ wirtten in 24 different languages. Let us remember this is the number of languages

that shall disappear in any given year.

    Of these twenty-four inscriptions, twelve are in dead languages, possessing zero native speakers, the twelve remaining ones are written in living languages and thus possess millions of tongues. As obvious as it may seem, the words must be said: the death of a language is not an abstract phenomenon: it is brought upon by the millions of deaths of those who spoke it. The distribution of the inscriptions throughout the sculpture is also a matter of reflection. Dead languages are inside the bust; they can be seen through the openings, where

the light comes in, specifically through the mouth of Philomela. They are however in darkness, and an artificial light needs to be projected to into the surface to read them: an artificial light becomes here the symbol of an archaeological exercise. These inscriptions in dead languages are to be found at unfomfortable angles; the physical effort and discomfort it takes to read them echoes the difficulty and effort needed to read these ancient languages, some of which require decades of palaeographical, epigraphical, and linguistic training. Inside the sculpture we thus can read the word tongue in the following dead languages:

​

1. Indo European dn̥ǵʰw.h₂s

2. Ancient Greek γλῶσσα

3. Latin lingua

4. Ancient Chinese

5. Egyptian Hieroglyphs

6. Phoenician (lšn /⁠lišān⁠/)

7. Sumerian 𒅴 (eme)

8. Old English tunge

9. Old German Zunga

10. Old slavic ѩзыкъ (językŭ)

11. Protosemitic lišān

12. Protobantu (swahili) dʊ̀dɪ́m.

​

​

The interesting thing about language is that it is in constant evolution, and thus does it manage to escape its own entropy. These languages have all created modern words that descend from them. For this reason, these linguistic roots can be found in the head or around the heart

of the sculpture and give, on its external surface, the word tongue in twelve living languages:

​

13. French langue

14. English tongue

15. Italian lingua

16. German Zunge

17. Arabic لسان (lisan)

18. Hebrew לָשׁוֹן

19. Chinese 舌头 (sh.tou)

20. Swahili ulimi

21. Russian язык (yazyk)

22. Hindi जीभ (jeebh)

23. Greek γλώσσα (gl.ssa)

24. Spanish lengua

​

Language is a democratic fact: it belongs to the most educated and to the most disenfranchised. Is it not remarkable that we have lost whole works of the greatest minds of antiquity, while still retaining some vulgar graffitti inscriptions. It is for this reason that I chose a grafitti aesthetic to cover the sculpture in languages, in language. Philomela’s destroyed mouth thus becomes a scream: a scream for one who was forced forevermore to silence, a scream that ensures that ‘the skies will hear us, and any god that may be there.’

​