Seismic Shifts

The work is a two-part seismogram. A digital trace listens to the room and draws its acoustic energy as a single, slowly scrolling line, one mic, one line, one slow scroll. A hand-drawn companion piece sets that small reading inside a much longer arc: 65,000 years of Aboriginal sign languages, including Warlpiri, Yolngu, Arandic and others, pockmarked by the seismic moments that have shaped and unmade deaf life and signed languages.

That longer trace runs from the deep continuity of Aboriginal sign languages, through the years before the 1880 Milan Congress, the suppression of signed languages in deaf education that followed, and the eugenics of Alexander Graham Bell and his contemporaries. Across that arc, Deaf existence and signed languages plummet below the historical baseline and have not, even now, recovered.

The claim is that what is recorded is real: a room has presence, with or without anyone to hear, see, or feel it; a language has presence, with or without an institution willing to recognise it.