Derrida famously asked: “What links writing to violence?” Writing Lessons explores that question in the context of bird extinction by minimalist means: 40 wood-framed slate boards with embedded speakers in a square gallery space. The speakers emit the continuous sound of chalk writing by a group of students asynchronously writing and erasing the names of extinct birds in Latin, the “dead” language of scientific classification. Writing and erasing, writing and erasing…. sounds not unlike a flock of chickadees chirping away in the bushes while foraging for food. Slate boards conjure up the kind of education-by-rote that dominated 18th and 19th century schools. Could the process of writing, of naming, of classifying be linked to our objectification of and further separation from nature? And could that process be transformed into a composite sound literally framed by the very site of scholastic repression – slate boards taking dictation ad nauseum.