The Language of Loss

"may-por-e" is an installation in which two Amazon parrots have been trained to speak an extinct South American language.

The artist, Rachel Berwick, was inspired by a story about the eighteenth-century explorer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt in which he was said to have found a parrot that was the sole remaining speaker of a lost South American language.  Berwick was intrigued by the idea that parrots could be the sole and imperfect conduit through which an entire tribe's existence could be traced.

Working with Von Humboldt's notes, and with the collaborative efforts of a bird behaviorist, two linguists, and a sound engineer, the parrots were trained to 'speak' the language.

Douglas H. Whalen, linguist, President and Founder of the Endangered Language Fund, and Vice President of Research of Haskins Laboratories at Yale University, will join Rachel Berwick to discuss the exchange between art and linguistics that developed during the making and exhibition of "may-por-e."

Rachel Berwick-
is an Associate Professor at Rhode Island School of Design and has previously taught at Yale University School of Art. She is represented by Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York. Her work has been shown at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Serpentine Gallery in London. She is included in the Seventh International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey.

EMAIL: rberwick@mindspring.com
URL: http://www.realartways.org/archive/Berwick.htm

Douglas H. Whalen-
is Vice President of Research for Haskins Laboratories and the Founder and President of The Endangered Language Fund, Inc. He is a Principal Investigator of links between production and perception of speech for the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. His work has been published in the journals Science, Brain and Language, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

page last modified 09/30/01