OTORIGÈNE

Otorigène is a trio on the edge between the deaf and hearing worlds, exploring the limits of sound and French Sign Language in the service of poetry. A project to create an unidentified spectacular object.

“Sign languages are special in that they are not totally foreign to the vocal languages in which they develop, but at the same time they are based on a totally different understanding of the world. We walk the same streets, eat the same food, dress according to the same dress codes and apply the same rules of social life. But a chasm separates us that can prove to be a gulf, introducing a radical strangeness into our shared culture. The fragility of a fundamental difference. We don’t feel the world in the same way. And we have developed radically different ways of understanding and being moved by it. So what about poetry? A way of approaching the reality of others without reflecting on it? A way of making us feel something beyond words? Brigitte Baumié.

Three people, Anaïs Gardou, Antoine Arnera and Jessica Martin Maresco, who do not have the same means of expression, are tackling the question of music and poetry, for the hearing, the hard of hearing and the deaf, the semantic issues specific to our two languages, so close and so foreign, and the translation, so complex when it comes to Sign Language.

Antoine, with his electroacoustic device, improvises to accompany the poems performed in Sign Language or Visual Vernacular by Anaïs Gardou. Jessica, on the borderline between the two, is both translator and vocal improviser.