The Slightest Gesture

An excerpt from the Slightest Gesture. Listen.

Deligny Excerpt:

Deligny Translation:

A Screening and Experimental Translation

of the Cinema of Fernand Deligny
Natasha Marie Llorens and Mary Walling Blackburn
Thursday, May 26th, 2011, 7pm

Location: 360 Court Street, Brooklyn , NY 11231
(subway F/G Carroll street, President Street exit)
Church entrance through green door.
Directions Here

In the 1960’s, Fernand Deligny, French pedagogue and cohort of Deleuze and Oury, moved in with a group of so-called ‘unmanageables’ in the south of France. This community of autistic children wandered through the rocky Mediterranean wilderness. Deligny followed with a camera. He filmed them because “language is sometimes more problem than tool”; it was more effective to dispatch with the tongue in favor of the eye. Later, his subjects would observe themselves on film, detect the gap between their behavior and others, and sometimes alter their interactions with those outside of autistic space.

Autism denotes those who process sensory and social information according to singular logics – this singularity is responsible for the isolation of the autistic mind, their seemingly tangential relation to other beings. When autism is imagined by the non-autistic as the radical other, Deligny nudges his viewer to ask themselves: “How do we move near and with the Radical Other?” Our collaboration is the performance of another kind of movement, a moving with one another and the film.

These films are not available in the United States and the soundtrack is not translated. As one soundtrack quietly plays, we will offer a competing soundtrack. Llorens will translate the fragments that are intelligible and Walling Blackburn will annotate this running translation. Our sonic intervention hovers on the threshold of translation and footnote, visitation and occupation. We perform the logic of collaboration through our engagement with this film.

Bios:

Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator based in New York. She is collaborating with Ramia Mazé on a book project for the platform Design Act that focuses on socially and politically engaged architecture and design.

Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist living in Brooklyn. Her article ” XOXO Insanity, Institution…” will be published in e-flux journal in June.

TOGETHER:
Mary Walling Blackburn’s “Library for (the Land of Fuck)” was recently
part of Double Session (www.doublesession.net) curated
by Natasha Marie Llorens at CCS Bard.
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