performance in Italian and LIS | duration 50 min

c/o ZONA K, admission allowed with membership 2024

In collaboration with Danae Festival

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Je Vous Aime is a lecture-performance about a short film, so short that it lasts barely a second: it is 1891, four years before the Lumière premiere. Georges Demenÿ invents a device that for the first time manages to project a faint moving image: his own face uttering the words “Je vous aime”. This is technically the first video ever, which will lead to the invention of the cinematograph and eventually cinema itself.

Starting from History, 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 highlights the anti-history, or rather “those whom History does not take into account”; thus revealing how that first video was aimed at teaching lip-reading to deaf children – after they were prevented by law from signing. This was the verdict of the Milan Congress, the consequences of which still affect Deaf people today. In Italy, Italian Sign Language (LIS) was only recognised as a true language in May 2021: 141 years later. Je vous Aime is, therefore, a multimedia performative stage action that unfolds between verbal storytelling, slides, video testimonies in Italian Sign Language (LIS), and Visual Sign (a poetic form of sign languages) with the aim of discussing audism, phonocentrism, and linguicism, and rewriting the “literature of the masters”.

performer Diana Anselmo and Sara Pranovi director Diana Anselmo video testimonies Paolo Girardi, Leonarda Catalano, Mario Minucci, Maurizio Anselmo, Anna Folchi, Vincenza Giuranna, Diana Vantini, Matteo Pedrazzi produced with the support of IntercettAzioni – Centro di Residenza Artistica della Lombardia

Photo by Sara Meliti

Diana Anselmo is a Deaf performer, activist and improvised human being.Bilingual LIS and Italian, she made her debut with her first performance “Autoritratto in 3 atti” (2021), still presented at various Italian and international festivals. Abroad, he made his debut in Berlin with “Le Sacre du Printemps (2022)” by Xavier Le Roy. He is one of the founders of Al.Di.Qua. Artists, the first association in Europe of and for artists* with disabilities.

Sara Pranovi is a LIS interpreter with specific expertise in the world of performance. On stage, she has translated numerous shows into LIS: alongside Marta Cuscunà (Corvidae, Sguardi di Specie) and Irene Serini (Abracadabra), she has also interpreted in sign language the works “Abbracci” by Teatro Telaio, “I Danni del Pomodoro” by Teatro d’Emergenza, “Escargot” by Teatro del Piccione, “Il Tenace Soldatino di Piombo” by Teatro delle Apparizioni and “Pornodrama 2.0” by Giuseppe Comuniello and Camilla Guarino.