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 brothers, when Georges Demenÿ invented a device that projected a moving image for the first time: a quick close-up in which Demenÿ punctuates the words Je Vous Aime (I love you).

Starting from History, always the result of a meticulous selection of what can be preserved and what is lost, and from the Archive, a tool serving a specific system of power, the performance uncovers the anti-history: “those whom History ignores”. This first moving image, in fact, was created with the aim of teaching lip-reading to Deaf children, after the use of Sign Language was banned by law.

The historical hindrance to using the body, to using a language that resides in movement, is captured in the words from the Acts of the Congress of Milan, 1880: “In this mimetic demonstration, where is the soul? Where is the thought? Where is the origin? Where is the destiny? None of this: there is only the body; the body, meaning the lesser part of the human being”. This idea forms the ethical and kinesthetic core of the performance.

Through a multimedia approach of storytelling, slides, video testimonies in Italian Sign Language (LIS), and Visual Sign (VS, the poetic form of sign languages), the performance addresses audism, phonocentrism, linguicism, and rewriting of the “literature of the masters”.