JE VOUS AIME

Je Vous Aime is a lecture-performance about a very short film, so short that it lasts just one second: it is 1891, four years before the Lumière brothers’ premiere.

Starting from history, which is always the result of a meticulous choice between what can be preserved and what cannot, and from the archive, a device at the service of a certain system of power, the performance aims to highlight anti-history. That is, “those whom history does not take into account”; thus revealing how the first video ever was screened in a Parisian school for the deaf, with the specific intention of teaching lip reading to its students – after they were prohibited by law from signing.

In 1880, sign languages were abolished throughout Europe. Such was the verdict of the Milan Congress, the consequences of which still affect deaf people today.

In Italy, LIS was only recognised as a true language again in May 2021, 141 years later. The historical impediment to using the body, to using a language that resided in movement, was that ‘In this mimetic demonstration, where is the soul? Where is the thought? Where is the origin? Where is destiny? None of this: there is only the body; the body, that is to say, the smallest part of the human being’ (Proceedings of the Milan Congress, 1880), is the kinaesthetic, aesthetic and ethical focus of the performance.

Je Vous Aime is therefore a multimedia performance that unfolds through verbal storytelling, slides, video testimonials in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and Visual Sign (a poetic form of sign language) with the aim of discussing audism, phonocentrism and linguicism and rewriting the “literature of the masters”. Because beyond everything they wanted us to believe, in front of the papers, documents and archives, “Our body remains the enduring reality”.