Les Enfants Sauvages - al museo is conceived as an exploration of the ‘wild’ ways in which sign languages have been transmitted and survived; languages that were abolished across Europe in 1880 in favour of the exclusive teaching of speech as the ultimate marker of humanity as opposed to animality, of the cultivated as opposed to the uncultivated, and of the civilised as opposed to the savage.

Contraband languages that survived in secrecy, safeguarded in the hands of Deaf nativesigning children. Only 5% of Deaf people are born to Deaf parents: an extreme numerical minority upon whom the burden of preserving the future of the Community was unknowingly placed.

In the school bathrooms, often the only lit spaces removed from the gaze and repression of teachers, the language - itself wild in its own way - continued to circulate clandestinely, passed on by these children to their peers through a body-to-body mode of transmission that was utterly unruly, uncontrolled, and spontaneous, carried out by veritable enfants sauvages.

The title of the pièce nods to François Truffaut’s film, in which the director takes on the role of a teacher at the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds.
The performance reflects on the different translations of ‘sauvage’ found in the English and Italian versions, which give the same word two distinct destinies: wild and savage.

From the polysemantic nature embedded within the French word itself, entire forests of meaning emerge: the wild is, in the words of queer theorist J. Halberstam, “a challenge to a presumed order of things, a form of existence that eludes the rigid biopolitical constraints of power.” And in the words of anthropologist A. Favole, “it is not chaos, but the womb of Mother Earth in which life takes shape and organizes itself.”