At the heart of his artistic research, grounded in different converging fields, there’s the thrust and relaunch in the aesthetics of dynamics of surveillance, of aural systems of discrimination, of techniques of medicalization that have fueled forms of control over the deaf body. The folds of that silenced history reappear in the visual and conceptual short circuits of his works, thrown into the present of an action that is both artistic and political. In all the fields in which he moves – performing arts, visual arts, activism – Anselmo roots a joyful posture capable of irrigating critical energies that open up to unexplored readings of reality.
To fully understand the body of works on display, it is essential to look at the historical period between the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, a time when Deaf people suffered the effects of the positivist phobia for the instrumental exploration of the “human machine”, oriented towards its biopolitical control. It’s the affirmation of strategies that promote the “re-education” of the Deaf, all categorized as mute and consequently incapable. The cornerstone of that history is the oralist verdict of the Milan Congress of 1880 that regulated, at a European level, the education of deaf people, establishing the supremacy of the oral language and affirming the phonocentric ideology throughout Europe by means of the abolition of Sign Languages, forced by the Congress onwards to be passed down in secret. The abolition of Sign Language teaching in school institutions decreed a regressive turn aimed to normalizing the act of speaking, considered the only morally acceptable axis for progress. The stigma towards the gestures of the signing body is accompanied by the pathologization of mutism, branded as a sign of “mental weakness”, a “defect” to be corrected so that the deaf person can integrate, by disappearing, into the hearing world.
Thanks to a research period at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds in Paris (INJS), Anselmo takes us, with the works on display, into the Speech Laboratory and the Hearing Clinic of the phonetician Hector-Victor Marichelle (1862–1929) who, with an irreducible oralist anxiety, experimented with instruments for the correction of the hearing organs and the development of phonation in young deaf people, fueling the dream of the “speaking deaf person”.
The so-called “pure oral method” forces deaf people to learn to speak, with systems that aim to affirm the articulatory method, phonetic exercise, and therefore lip reading. In that framework in which the order of speech coincides with the speech of order, the body of the deaf person – by definition the embodied instrument of communication – is subjected to invasive techniques. In the institutions created for “deaf-mute” children, speech education is presented as an element of hygiene. Collective hydrotherapy treatments and sports activities are prescribed as means to serve moral development and voice formation. The hands of teachers and doctors are intruded into the mouth with the aim of opening, shaping, manipulating the palate, the tongue, the dental arch. A penetration that goes as far as extreme experimentation, such as perforating the skull to create openings for sound.
Anselmo intervenes on copies of archive photographs preserved at the INJS, documenting that bear the signs of the physiological impetus and technomania of the late Nineteenth Century, and chooses to cover the faces of the “patients”, who have never consented to become visual witnesses of the corrective methods applied to their bodies. If the artist alludes to the contemporary technique that obscures or blurs the faces of children to guarantee their right to privacy, he does so to underline the infantilization to which deaf subjects are subjected even in adulthood, labeled as infants – incapable of speaking – and therefore considered ontologically immature. Anselmo covers the faces with chewed chewing gum, smeared with saliva and retained in his own oral cavity, transforming it into a plastic trace of incorporation. It is a passage in that mouth considered only capable of carrying out chewing and inferior because it is not interested in staging the theater of the word.
As an ideal counterpoint to these images, Anselmo brings to the fore the perspective of a student who, during an articulation lesson, refuses the invasive proximity of the teacher – mouth to mouth – by writing in protest on the blackboard, in capital letters, “ENOUGH!”, without making a sound, as documented in a letter published in the newspaper Presse du Silence. The artist makes a self-portrait on carbon paper while quoting that episode in Italian Sign Language (LIS). In doing so, he articulates a material critique of the engravings on supports blackened with lampblack, used at the time to record speech. In the drawings, the artist claims the Right to Sign Language, with its spatial parameters of hand configuration, palm orientation, facial expressions and body distribution. He reaffirms the link between gesture and language, as well as between sign and language, highlighting how the processes of naming and attribution of meaning in Deaf culture are rooted in bodily experience. But he does so without temporal markers, so that the work can suggest an “ENOUGH!” timeless, which is valid yesterday and today as a sign of protest!
The sequence of speaking mouths, drawn on charcoal on the wall, that lip «J’ai mal à la tête» evokes the childish tone of the sentences chosen by Marichelle to train the terminal phonation apparatus and therefore lip reading. Here the artist, once again, exposes a historical document to bend its meaning and value in the key of a refusal. Faced with this process of intrusion and manipulation: I have a headache!
Key, scissors, hammer are used as speech therapy tools on the table of Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspar Itard (1774–1838), historically recognized as the father of Special Pedagogy, whom François Truffaut plays in his L’Enfant Sauvage (1970), filmed precisely at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourd in Paris.
The film tells about the story of Victor, a boy who grew up in isolation in the woods since early childhood, and about Itard’s attempt to educate him to speak, driven by his obsession with curing his deafness. Although the film does not show the invasive practices such as the use of red-hot irons, injections and electric shocks adopted by the French doctor, the oralist intent exercised through the association sign-signified-signifier is evident. On a metal support, Anselmo sculpts a symbol with a vaguely heraldic reference, in which Itard’s objects – key, scissors, hammer – are respectively permuted into – scalpel, surgical scissors and otoscope – therefore into contemporary medical-surgical devices, new tools that signal a path of medicalization that has ancient roots.
The three little red plates propose a further visual gesture of semantic interpolation. The images depicted set up a medical stylization of the hollow of the mouth, of the head with the ear in evidence, and of the detail of an ear. They are there to remind us that Deafness continues to be placed on the operating table, alluding to the kitchen table.
The title of the exhibition «Deaf, not dead» wraps around the ear and transforms into a removable hearing aid, to make explicit a choice, the one made by Anselmo himself, which is configured as a precise act of subjectivation.
The oral cavity houses a tongue-shaped mirror, an object that recalls, once again, the use of reflective surfaces in the oral speech therapy practices of the early Twentieth Century. The mirroring tongue reverses the plane: the spectator discovers himself reflected as the subject and object of manipulation, while the fact that speaking is here imposed by the other is highlighted.
The interweaving of documents from archives removed and recrossed by a situated knowledge, imaginaries overwritten with the expertise of one’s own body, symbols modified through a semantic-visual torsion, constitutes the tactic – sophisticated and assertive – that Anselmo uses to make Deaf culture a field of aesthetic research that invests the sphere of the visual to shape other visions, and so to be able to affirm: «Let not Deafness disappear, but the vision that you have built of it».
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Piersandra Di Matteo is a performing arts scholar, curator, and dramaturg. She is member of the Research Centers PerLA | Performance Epistemologies Research Lab, and SSH | Sound Studies Hub at the Università Iuav of Venice, where she teaches Curating Performing Arts. Currently serving as the curator of the Multidisciplinary Residency at the Académie/Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, she has previously been the artistic director of the Short Theatre Festival (Rome, 2021–2024) and the Atlas of Transitions Biennial (Bologna, 2017–2020). Di Matteo has delivered lectures and seminars at renowned research centers and universities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Amsterdam, New York City, Philadelphia, São Paulo, and Montréal. As Romeo Castellucci's closest theoretical collaborator and dramaturg, she has worked extensively within the major international theater institutions. Her recent publications include A bocca chiusa. Effetti di ventriloquio e scena contemporanea (Sossella Editore, 2024) and SPEAKING NEARBY (bruno, 2024).
