Diana Anselmo
Je Vous Aime
curated by Bernardo Follini
19 March – 13 October 2024

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents “Je Vous Aime”, the first solo exhibition of Deaf artist and performer Diana Anselmo. “Je Vous Aime” constitutes the new chapter of a larger project launched in 2023 with the homonymous lecture-performance, conceived by Anselmo in collaboration with Sara Pranovi, LIS (Italian Sign Language) interpreter.
The exhibition project is the result of an historical research developed in different archives and realised in Turin in collaboration with the National Museum of Cinema and in Paris with the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds and the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris.
“Je Vous Aime” is an investigation into the relationship between pre-cinema and the history of the oppression of the Deaf community. The research goes through the scenario of the late 19th century, a historical period governed by the fields of medical psychology, evolutionary anthropology and the pathologisation of non-normative bodies. In 1880, the Congress of Milan, an international meeting aimed to determine the future of the deaf people’s education, established the primacy of oral language and abolished sign languages on a European scale. The effects of this resolution are drastic and prolonged for the Deaf community: schools were converted from sign language to exclusively oralist, forcing sign language to be passed on secretly, far from the eyes of the teachers. In Italy, LIS will only be recognised as a real language from May 2021.
In this historical setting, in 1891, four years after the première of the Lumière brothers, Georges Demenÿ produced Je Vous Aime, the first chronophotographic projection ever. The image on the wall, uncertain and dimly lit, portrays for less than a second the face of Demenÿ himself in the act of pronouncing the phrase “Je vous aime”. The film marks a fundamental moment in the history of cinematography but, at the same time, it represents the first coercive use of this technology against Deaf people. Demenÿ’s film is in fact commissioned by Hector Marichelle, the main promoter at the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds of the ‘treatment’ of deafness with phonetic and visual techniques. In an ideological context that considers deafness as a disease and sign language its most visible symptom, the first film in history was created with the declared intention of training deaf children to read lips and learn to speak.
“Je Vous Aime” traces the close relationship between the birth of cinema and the ableist and audist policies, tracing an invisible thread of continuity between the control of bodies in the last century and the ongoing social exclusion of the Deaf community. Diana Anselmo exhibits and manipulates images and archive documents from the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds, in dialogue with a new video production, realised through visual sign. A poetic form peculiar to sign languages, visual sign activates the visual and imaginative component of communication through a meticulous physical construction of images. Alternating the official history with minor stories, “Je Vous Aime” represents a visual score and a chant for the emancipation of the Deaf community.

Diana Anselmo is a Deaf performer and author, activist and improvised human being.
Bilingual LIS and Italian, during the master’s degree in Theatre and Performing Arts they debuted with their first performance “Autoritratto in 3 atti” (2021), still presented in various Italian and foreign festivals (DIS_Festival – Serbia, ORME Festival – Switzerland, Culturgest – Portugal).
Abroad, they made their debut in Berlin, performing with the likes of Xavier Le Roy in “Le Sacre du Printemps (2022)”.
Diana is one of the founders of Al.Di.Qua. Artists, the first association in Europe of and for disabled artists, for which they have participated as a speaker at various European festivals (IntegrART – Switzerland, DansFunk – Sweden, Holland Dance Festival – Holland).
Diana is accessibility manager of Oriente Occidente Festival and Spazio Kor, with a specific focus on the Deaf community; among other things, they’re the youngest member of the Cultural Advisory Board of the British Council.