Asylum Elogy, Fernand Deligny

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Image courtesy of Barcelona Cultura

Fernand Deligny was born in 1913 in Bergues, in northern France. He was first a teacher of maladjusted children in Paris and Nogent-sur-Marne in 1938, and then an educator in the medical and pedagogical institute at the Armentières asylum during World War II. He founded the first clubs for the prevention of delinquent behavior in Lille in 1943, and then became the director of the Lille Observation and Triage Centre, which he turned into an open place staffed by workers and Resistance fighters.

From 1967 and following his encounter with Janmari, a nonverbal autistic 10-year-old child, he established an informal network of care for autistic children in the Cévennes, a Protestant-tradition region in southern France.

The life and work of Deligny are indissociable from his attempts to allow delinquent, psychotic and then autistic children and adolescents placed in his care to live according to their "ways of being" rather than to the social rules of education. 

Asylum Elogy is an opportunity to ask questions about the work of Fernand Deligny, and to stage the experimental forms invested in the Cévennes attempt: Deligny’s writing, inspired by the autistic child Janmari’s endless "tracing"; the famous cartography of the children’s "wandering lines" traced by non-professional educators (workers, country folk, students) who lived with the children 24 hours a day; as well as the images—photos, films, paintings—made throughout this quest for "the common human."

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