| Where |
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| With | Diana Anselmo |
| Framework | A Journey |
| Language | IS/LIS/DGS/EN/FR/Kata Kolok |
| Access | The space is step-free accessible |
| Booking | Not required |
| Curators | Léon Kruijswijk |
| Credits | Co-produced by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Triennale Milano as part of the ‘Perform Inform Transform: Participatory Performance in Art Museums’ (PIT) project, co-funded by the European Union. |
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Video still from Diana Anselmo’s new film, directed by Diana Anselmo and filmed by Fabio Zamparo at Triennale Milano
© Diana Anselmo
Les Enfants Sauvages
Diana Anselmo
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Les Enfants Sauvages is a newly commissioned performance by Milan-based artist Diana Anselmo (1997, Palermo) that explores the fraught history of how Deaf people have been perceived through the idea of the ‘savage’.
Moving from Enlightenment fantasies of the ‘noble savage’, through the violent suppression of sign languages in 19th-century Europe, to oralist systems that framed Deaf children as undisciplined and in need of domestication, the piece examines how Deaf lives and forms of expression have been controlled, erased and forced underground. At the same time, it foregrounds the resistance and inventiveness of Deaf communities, whose sign languages survived through secret, child-led transmission.
In collaboration with the predominantly signing village of Bengkala in Bali, where the sign language Kata Kolok developed naturally within the community, and with Deaf communities in the broader region of Luxembourg and Milan, Les Enfants Sauvages reclaims ‘wildness’ not as lack or deficit, but as a vital mode of survival, recoil and collective creation.
Biography
Diana Anselmo (Palermo, 1997) is a queer and Deaf performer and visual artist. His practice combines an-archival and anti-historical documentary research in the history of oppression of the Deaf community. Bilingual LIS/ITA, he debuted in 2021 with his lecture-performance Autoritratto in 3 atti, still being performed in Italy and abroad. In 2023, he created the lecture Je Vous Aime, which took the form of a solo exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 2024 curated by Bernardo Follini, marking a fundamental shift of his practice towards visual arts. In the same year, he co-signs Monumentum DA with the dance-maker Cristina Kristal Rizzo. In 2025 he developed the second chapter Pas Moi, both as a performance and a museum exhibition at Scuola Piccola Zattere curated by Irene Calderoni and Margherita Falqui. The same year, he became artistic director of the first edition of Repubblica Sorda, Italy’s only professional festival dedicated to Deaf arts.