Susan Hiller
* 1940 in Tallahassee (us), lives and works in Berlin (de) and London (gb)

The Last Silent Movie
2007, Audio installation, DVD, 20 min, color, audio with subtitles, loop
(Neue Nationalgalerie)

What every gardener knows
2003, Outdoor installation, audio program, looped (electronically controlled carillon)
(Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum) 

Susan Hiller’s multifaceted work challenges the methods of conceptual art and upsets the standards of anthropology. With use of cataloguing, systematization, and documentation, the artist brings to light repressed cultural practices. The production of subjectivity is a frequent concern of hers. Hiller posits the sayable for the unsayable, and vice versa, in order to liberate hidden or marginalized cultural dimensions. In this, oral forms such as narration and sound play just as an important a role as photography, video and installation.
In her film The Last Silent Movie Hiller explores languages that are extinct or in process of dying out. We hear voices articulating words in these rare languages, against a black screen. They sing, tell stories, or recite  vocabulary lists. Others charge the listeners, directly or metaphorically, with the injustice of their extinction. By means of Hiller's choreography of these sound documents, the film uncannily releases the spirits of the past. In Hiller’s own words, the work “opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening.” In The Last Silent Movie Hiller revisits a forgotten treasure trove of experience, preserved in oral tradition. At the same time, she interrogates historical eurocentric concepts of civilization, modernity, and dominant culture. Her archive of linguistic rhythms, sounds, and melodies bears witness to the transformation and multiplicity of parallel semantic systems while simultaneously adverting to their transience.

Starting with a deep bass, the notes build up to a highly synthesized and penetrating force before slowly fading away again. Only when listened to a second time, more attentively, can these sounds be fully distinguished from those of the surrounding “urban nature” in the weed-filled wasteland of the site. What every gardener knows is a sound installation developed by Susan Hiller in relation to Gregor Mendel’s (1822–84) theory of genetic inheritance. Based upon Mendel’s Laws, which should be familiar to all gardeners, an electronically programmed carillon rings out: a long version on every hour and a shorter one on the quarter hour. Hiller used the binary system of Mendelian genetics to develop this composition of two repeated notes—a “crossbreed” of familiar and alien elements.
As the source of sound is hidden, the chaotic vegetation of the area comes to the fore as visual backdrop of the aural sensations. The Enlightenment defined man primarily as a seeing subject, whereas hearing was regarded as an unreflected, manipulative sensory mechanism whereby information was transmitted directly from the outer ear to the brain. Hiller uses this sensory experience to question the rationalization of the subject and examine Mendel’s discovery of genetic patterns, which was later abused by the so-called science of eugenics to justify killing people with »undesirable« hereditary traits, just as gardeners try to eliminate weeds. To this end she has deliberately chosen the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum with its mixture of weeds, wild grasses, and uncontrolled tree growth as the location for her work. In contrast to the idea of breeding perfectly uniform populations, Hiller’s interpretation of Mendel’s Laws celebrates the diversity of life forms—a variety that can only be produced by combining alien characteristics with familiar ones and vice versa.