deafnotdead
Diana Anselmo: deafnotdead
December 11, 2024 – February 14, 2025
Essay by Piersandra di Matteo
Galleria Eugenia Delfini is pleased to present deafnotdead* Diana Anselmo’s first solo exhibition in an Italian gallery.
Anselmo is a Deaf and queer activist, performer and visual artist. After the success of her first solo exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, he continues his exploration of some key episodes in the history of the Deaf community through archive materials, photographs and drawings. Specifically, the gallery exhibition investigates the audist and phonocentric desire of the late nineteenth century that fueled the chimera of the “cure” of Deafness, understanding it as a disease rather than an identity, and which still today contributes to the persistence of discrimination and social exclusion of the Deaf community.
Alternating official history with minor stories, Anselmo explores the coercive methods of “re-education” imposed on Deaf people, exhibits and manipulates archive images from the National Institute of Deaf Youth in Paris which document “cure” treatments to which deaf children were subjected, together with symbols and tools from speech therapy lessons, and carbon drawings aimed at capturing some signs of Italian Sign Language (LIS) and challenging the concept of the “silent image”.
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The title “deaf not dead” is a common topos in the American signing Deaf community, and the artist uses it to ironically refer to the automatic correction of telephone keyboards that until a few years ago automatically replaced “deaf” with “dead”. Thanks to the proximity of the two letters on the keyboard, and a sinister technocratic audism, the most correct word between the two is suggested, so the attempt to type “I’m deaf” is changed to a more lugubrious “I’m dead”. No spectral wish, only the theme of forced correction that is found in the historic prohibition of the use of sign language (abolished throughout Europe in 1880, and only recognized by the Italian State in 2021), and in the anti-historical attempt to normalize the Deaf body, rectifying it on the keyboard as in hearing society.
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Diana Anselmo (1997, Palermo) is a Deaf and queer activist, performer and visual artist.
Bilingual LIS and Italian, as a performer Anselmo debuted in 2021 with his first lecture-performance Autoritratto in tre atti, presented to date in more than thirty national and international institutions including MAXXI, Rome; MART, Rovereto; Goethe Institut, Rome; CAMERA and Lavanderia a Vapore, Turin; Culturgest and Casa da Música in Lisbon and Porto; Synergeio Performing Arts Center in Cyprus, and in Festivals such as Gender Bender, Bologna; Orlando Festival, Bergamo; Theaterformen in Hannover.
In 2022 he was invited by the French choreographer Xavier Le Roy to perform his new show Le Sacre du Printemps at the Sophiensæle in Berlin in a trio with Scarlet Yu and Alex Achour. In the same year Anselmo created You Have to Be Deaf to Understand, a show with three Deaf performers entirely in Visual Sign (a poetic form typical of sign languages) with which he performed in various international sign venues including Riksteatern Crea, Stockholm; International Visual Theatre – IVT, Paris.
2023 was the year of his lecture-performance Je Vous Aime – a performance for hearing people, a multimedia work that unfolds between verbal storytelling (ITA and LIS) and elements of Visual Sign, presenting it at the TSA Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo and TPP Teatro Pubblico Pugliese, as well as at various festivals such as DANAE, Milan.
In 2024 the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin curated his first solo exhibition as a visual artist starting from the archive research carried out for the performance Je Vous Aime (from which the exhibition takes its name). In the same year, Anselmo started a collaboration with the choreographer and dance-maker Cristina Kristal Rizzo, with whom he co-authored the dance show Monumentum DA, which after an initial study presented at MilanOltre, Milan, toured in its complete form at Festivals such as Torino Danza, Turin; Short Theatre, Rome; Asteroide Amor, Venice.
Finally, Anselmo is accessibility manager and Deaf Cultural Advisor for various cultural institutions and festivals in Italy, such as Oriente Occidente Dance Festival in Rovereto and Spazio KOR in Asti. He is also one of the co-founders and now president of Al.Di.Qua. Artist, the first professional association in Europe of and for disabled artists, with a focus on advocacy for accessibility in the artistic field, for which he participated as a speaker at various European festivals such as IntegrArt, Switzerland; DansFunk, Sweden; Holland Dance Festival, Netherlands, European Network of Cultural Centres, Lithuania.
