The Performance „Scriptings#26 Voix-off” by Achim Lengerer is taking place in the context of the exhibition “How do we speak? A repertoire of language.”
Artist and editor Achim Lengerer works on questions of political speech and language, which he addresses in his live performances, filmic soundtracks, or spatializes within installations and printed matter. Lengerer was educated at the Academy for Film and TV, FAMU, Prague; the STÄDELSCHULE, Frankfurt; and the SLADE School of Fine Arts, London. He completed his post-graduate studies at the Jan-van-Eyck-Academie, Maastricht, NL, in 2008. Lengerer founded different collaborative projects, such as freitagsküche in Frankfurt a.M., and voiceoverhead, with artist colleague Dani Gal.
Since 2009, Lengerer runs the Berlin-based showroom, production and publishing house, Scriptings, which invites artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, as well as activists – all working with the formats of script and text within their processes of critical production. In 2017, Lengerer participated in documenta 14 with the 21-hour radio piece “different time, different place, different pitch” (together with Dani Gal), commissioned by Savvy Funk and Deutschlandfunk.
During “How do we speak? A repertoire of language”, the artist will present a performative screening and reading of the French social worker, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny’s “voix-off” in Ce gamin, là (France, 1975). Together with a group of young adults, Deligny (1913–96), founded a community in the south of France in order to live with children labeled by psychiatrists as “autistic”.
For his movie, Ce gamin, là (1975, dir. Renaud Victor), Deligny uses the film’s voice-over as a literary narrative voice cautiously placed in a parallel relationship to the filmic image: a soundtrack that is laid “alongside” the picture track, and which expresses itself through a fragile balance with the children’s NOT SPEAKING. The performative screening and reading of Lengerer will explore the role of performing language as a form of communication, while testing the limits of what language is and how a story about ‘non-spoken’ words can be told.