Diana Anselmo

Diana Anselmo

Performer and Visual Artist, Milan, Italy

Pas Moi

Pas Moi is the concluding chapter of a documentary and affective research trajectory exploring the web of power and domination woven into major historiography. If the previous performance, Je Vous Aime – which later became a solo exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin – highlighted the re-educational implications for Deaf people in the context of the first projections of moving images that subsequently led to Cinema, Pas Moi follows a parallel path and, from a Deaf and signing perspective, delves into the genesis of the first instruments for recording, transmission, and reproduction of sound.

Through minor archives, anti-histories, and situated knowledge transmitted body-to-body, the celebrated devices that shaped the future of the film and music industries are revealed to have been conceived with an audist and phonocentric intent to “heal” deafness. A condition to be eradicated or made to disappear into the fabric of the hearing world, rather than an identity, a culture with its own language and community.

Pas Moi imagines where one can go if another is the starting point – beyond “the lack of hearing,” further ahead.

The piece takes the shape of a lecture-performance with multiple voices but without sound, unfolding verbally yet not vocally. It is a performative dialogue between two deaf people, conducted in sign language, the mother tongue (even if it doesn’t stay in the mouth) of two of the three deaf performers on stage. The conversation unfolds on two levels, shifting between a lecture and informal chat, and is made accessible to the non-signing audience through text projections that overturn the hierarchy of phonocentric domination.

An excerpt of 15’ will be shown at CIMAM.

Biography:

Diana Anselmo is a Deaf native signer and queer performer and visual artist, activist and improvised human being.

Bilingual in LIS and Italian, during his master's degree in Theater and Performing Arts, he debuted with his first performance, Autoritratto in tre atti (2021), performed over 30 times in various Italian and non-Italian festivals (Culturgest and Casa da Música, Portugal; Theaterformen, Germany; Synergeio Performing Arts, Cyprus; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneve, Switzerland).

As a performer, he made his debut in Berlin in Xavier Le Roy's Le Sacre du Printemps (2022). In the same year, he created You Have to Be Deaf to Understand, a performance in Visual Sign with two Deaf performers; presented in Italy and abroad in signing venues (Lisbon; Edinburgh; Riksteatren CREA, Stockholm; International Visual Theatre IVT, Paris). In 2023, he concluded his penultimate production Je Vous Aime – a performance for the hearing, presented in venues including TSA Teatro Stabile d'Abruzzo and TPP Teatro Pubblico Pugliese. The same performance in 2024 – somewhat like the artist who embodies it – changes gender and becomes a museum exhibition with the eponymous title Je Vous Aime at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.

In the same year, he signed with dance-maker Cristina Kristal Rizzo the co-authorship of the dance performance Monumentum DA, presented at various festivals including Torino Danza, Triennale Milano, MilanOltre. Straddling 2024 and 2025, he exhibited deafnotdead, his first gallery show at the Eugenia Delfini Gallery, Rome.

He is among the founders of Al.Di.Qua. Artists, Europe's first association of and for artists with disabilities, for which he has participated as a speaker at various European festivals (IntegrART, Switzerland; DansFunk, Sweden; Holland Dance Festival, Holland; Tracing the Trails, Lithuania). Among other posts, he is the accessibility manager of Oriente Occidente Festival and the youngest member of the Cultural Advisory Board of the British Council.