Contribution short abstract:

The paper focuses on embodied practices such as Foley art in experimental film and sound workshops with neurodivergent participants. It explores how neurodivergent expressions, considered as modes of enquiry, trouble the symbolic order and reimagine relations within more-than-human ecosystems.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper deals with non-symbolic meaning-making and neurodivergent expressions as modes of enquiry for more-than-human ecosystems. It is based on experimental film and sound workshops that I have been facilitating in Maarja küla in Estonia, a supported living facility for adults labelled with learning disabilities. Our shared artistic practices include Foley, i.e. recording sound effects for existing video using everyday objects and our bodies, as well as other techniques of embodiment drawing from fiction and estrangement, allowing us to re-materialise found footage and perform impossible encounters. The participants’ taste in repetition, burlesque and noise; the variations of attention and temporality that score our explorations; and the importance of traces, indexicality, touch and friction make up the position from which we learn together about nonhuman living beings.

The paper delves into different perspectives on non-symbolic meaning-making, including the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge (1969), Fernand Deligny’s Arachnean and permanent cinema (2008), as well as my own take on the notions of contagion, resonance and trace. Moreover, it questions whether non-symbolic and symbolic orders are commensurable and mutally translatable. How can we interprete Deligny’s statement that symbolic orders are not merely dominant, but exclude other forms of relation (2013)?

I propose to explore how neurodivergent expressions and their ecological embedding trouble the expectations of symbolic orders.

Finally, the paper reflects on the role of expressions miscast as stereotypy and automatism by behavioural studies, such as nonverbal sonic feedback, repetition and echolalia in the creative process with nonspeaking participants.