Last Words

Luis Camnitzer

Price £3 + pp
ISBN  978-1-907468-27-8
Year 2017
Edition 1,000
Pages 14
Binding softback; saddle stitched
Illustration text only
Dimensions 101 x 135 mm

BUY HERE from Cornerhouse Publications (Manchester)

Since the late 1960s, Luis Camnitzer has created works in a variety of media – including installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography – that expose our collective indifference to the violence governments inflict on individuals. A pioneer of conceptual art, Camnitzer critiques current political realities with a perspective informed by his first-hand experience of dictatorships in Latin America.

Last Words was originally composed in the wake of New Jersey’s historic decision to abolish the death penalty and as the US Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of lethal injections. The short, continuous text is a montage of select final statements by Death Row prisoners, collected from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s public records online and chosen because they include the word ‘love’. Last Words synthesises those statements, all spoken and transcribed in the first-person, into one continuous, shared voice that registers somewhere between a tragic love letter and a resigned goodbye.