Friday, 26 February 2021, 8 pm, Online
Available to Sunday, 28 February 2021

Scriptings#40: Entretien sonore avec Fernand Deligny
Proben für eine Tonspur
by Achim Lengerer

A conversation between Barbara von Flüe and Achim Lengerer about the “tentative” (experiment) by Fernand Deligny in the South of France, about the “voix-off” of his film “Ce gamin, là” along with Achim Lengerer’s exhibition project at Kolumba and the sound track “Scriptings#40: Entretien sonore avec Fernand Deligny. Proben für eine Tonspur,” (Rehearsals for a sound track), produced by Kolumba and the Studio Akustische Kunst of the West German Broadcasting Corporation in 2014. The conversation was recorded on 19 February 2021.

Lengerer’s engagement with the work of the French social worker, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny (1913–96) forms the starting point for the project, which will be realized in cooperation with Kolumba, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk music studio and FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists (Genk, Belgium). In the 1940s Deligny began working with children as a social worker. From the very beginning, his work was complemented by his writing: “Le moindre geste a une histoire” / “The smallest gesture has a story,” as he wrote in the first sentence of his November 1966 article “Journal d’un éducateur” / “Diary of an Educator.” In the course of the 1960s, Deligny increasingly withdrew from institutional contexts. Together with a group of young adults he founded a community in the south of France in order to live with children labelled by psychiatrists as “autistic.” In his work as a pedagogue, he aimed not to educate or heal the children entrusted to his care, but rather to enable them to create an environment and an arena for their own unique ways of utilizing space and time.
Over the decades, a number of documentary films with accompanying texts were produced (such as Le Moindre Geste, 1962–71, and Ce gamin, là, 1975, dir. Renaud Victor) as well as writings on the cinematographic image (“Camérer,” 1983, and “Ce qui ne se voit pas,” 1990). His ideas about film emerge in the way the sound track is employed in Ce gamin, là. Deligny uses the film’s voice-over as a literary narrative voice cautiously placed in a parallel relationship with the filmic image: a sound track which is laid “alongside” the picture track, and which expresses itself in a fragile balance with the children’s NOT SPEAKING.
The children’s voices on the one hand and Deligny’s language on the other complement each other in "Entretien sonore," the acoustic idiom of Achim Lengerer. The piece draws on materials from the publication Scriptings#26 by Dominique Hurth and Achim Lengerer and is the continuation of an exhibition project that the artist realized in Kolumba and at FLACC in Genk in the summer and autumn of 2014.

Speaker: Martin Bross
Realization: Achim Lengerer, Benedikt Bitzenhofer and Peter C. Simon
Production: WDR 2014/c. 50’
A collaboration between Kolumba, Cologne and FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists, Genk/BE. Funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn

With special thanks to Dominque Hurth for the collaborative translation of Scriptings#26 as well as to Boris Baltschun, Günter Baumann, Dani Gal, Lydia Hamann, Maria Iorio & Raphaël Cuomo and Christine Lemke. From early 2021 the accompanying publication will be available entitled Scriptings Political Scenarios "Voix-off: ...aber wir sind der Sprache scheißegal" by Achim Lengerer with texts by Fernand Deligny and Anne Querrien, published as a book by Scriptings/Archive Books and in digital form at Eeclectic.

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