Patience (Chirologies)

Patience (Chirologies) is an installation comprising thirty-two drawings on paper depicting gestural signs taken from various religious and mythological paintings in the Musée Fabre’s collection (Montpellier, France). Attached to steel plates in a regular grid pattern, these signs take the form of a choreographic and musical score, in which each sheet becomes a suspended note, a fragment of a language that predates speech. The installation draws inspiration from Chirologia (1644) by John Bulwer, a 17th-century English physician and writer known for his work on non-verbal communication and the human senses, and an advocate for the education of deaf people, who regarded the hand as an organ capable of “speaking all languages”.

These drawings establish a connection with the academic history of the Musée Fabre and the School of Fine Arts: the study of the life model and the codification of bodies and postures in classical painting inform the choice, depiction and arrangement of the poses. This link is reinforced by the figure of the deaf Montpellier-born painter Frédéric Peyson (1807–1877), who studied at the museum and bequeathed a significant portion of his works to it. The installation offers a fresh interpretation of the collection, questioning how the painter’s gesture can convey myths and knowledge and thus contribute to a collective memory of the representation of bodies.

The performance, co-written with Sylvanie Tendron and Geoffrey Badel – Deaf and hearing artists – brings this score to life: each drawing is translated into movement, a pose or an expression. The outstretched index finger, pointing gestures, glances and postures become vectors of meaning and direction, evoking the dii indigiti, those “unnamed gods” whom it was forbidden to name or point at in the earliest archaic Roman rites.

Through this encounter and dialogue between hearing and Deaf bodies, the drawings become music and a visual-gestural grammar, drawing the audience in to experience the tension between revealing and withholding, between encrypting and deciphering. The performance resembles a theatre of everyday life, where the hands do not serve to grasp, but become image, code, medium and passage, offering a sensory experience in which the hand’s own language speaks in its own way and extends beyond words.