silence's syllabics

As any culture identifying language as a natural irruption must, Wete'wetu society found the integration of the idea of death -- of the silencing of all language -- a difficult task at best. Through most of their history thought on death was dominated by a manichean split: death was either absolute silence, the elision of all language, or the overwhelming excess of language, a riot of sound and meaning overwhelming the mere flesh it suffused. The work above arose from a seminal moment of attempted conflation of the two concepts ... an esoteric idea espoused by only a few marginalized heretics, mystics and, most importantly, artists.