Je Vous Aime is about a film—so short it lasts just one second. The year is 1891, four years before the Lumière brothers’ first screening. That year, Georges Demenÿ invents a device called the phonoscope and creates the first moving image in history: his own face mouthing the words “Je vous aime.” But why? To teach lip reading to Deaf people, after sign language had been banned by law throughout Europe following the Milan Congress of 1880.
This historical moment is where the performance begins. Je Vous Aime reconstructs this forgotten fragment of history to shed light on an anti-history—that of a community systematically excluded from dominant narratives. Through a multimedia weave of spoken storytelling, images, subtitles, video-testimonies in LIS (Italian Sign Language), and Visual Sign (the poetic form of signed languages), the performance delves into the historical roots of audism and phonocentrism, restoring voice and presence to those from whom it was taken.
A hybrid and accessible stage space where aesthetics, politics, and memory converge: an exercise in rewriting, an act of love and resistance.