Paper short abstract:

My paper is based on ethnography focusing the interactions practices and construction of Deaf culture. I want to discuss an artistic project built on a cooperation between deaf artist and ethnographer to represent, with different media, a multi-sensory perception and a political view of deafness.

Paper long abstract:

"Deafness" is used by people with hearing loss, health care professionals, associations and institutions with different connotations compared to specific contexts: not only to indicate a physical condition, but also to the recognition of a culture, a language and a set of practices that are shared and accepted by the community.

During the ethnographic research, members of the National Community of Deaf in Perugia (Italy) organized a theatre and art lab that has gradually assumed central role in the activities of the institution as instrument to achieve multi-sensory forms of narrative, representation and interpretation of experiences of deafness. In this paper I will focus on artistic project that cross ethnographic materials and ceramic art to investigate the deaf social life and sensory experience. Using different media and multisensory devices, mostly visual and tattily, a deaf artist wanted to produce knowledge and take part in a debate about deafness in a public arena.

The debate that revolves around the Visual Anthropology highlighted, through theoretical and methodological approaches, the power of visual materials, in particular those products through partnerships with the social actors. Specifically, the intent was to show how the ethnographic footage may be used as tool for the representation of the experience, without making necessarily an ethnographic documentary.

Narrating his experiences and at the same time an ethnographic fieldwork, was tackled by the artist through three moments which he defines "crucial": the biological condition of the disease, the political/health path of oral enablement, concluding, the Sign Language as communication choice.