Non-verbal expressions
Valentine Vermeil / Temps Machine
They have very little power of speech, if none at all. Their particular body movements are an expression of their personality and seem to come from a make-believe and poetic world. These ‘non-verbal expressions’ are those of a body that immobilises them.
Autism is sometimes defined as a withdrawal into an interior world that refuses contact with the outside world. This withdrawal can be regarded as the result of a radial lack of organisation of the body image.
A photograph is taken of a man making a sculpture. He stops and takes a small piece of string from his pocket. He fiddles with it while the photo is being taken, then puts it back in his pocket. This is a whole language to be deciphered that we can imagine is addressed to the other person, in this case, the photographer.
These gestures captured via the lens show what can be interpreted as coded messages. There is a demand that needs to be heard and understood. “Humans are essentially speaking beings […].As the word indicates, autistics [from the Greek autos: ‘oneself’] listen to themselves. They hear many things”, explains Lacan in a lecture on the symptom, in 1975.
Learning how to decipher in order to hear. With this work made between 2004 and 2006 at the Maison de l’Orée in Ris-Orangis, Valentine Vermeil puts together some interesting material for therapeutic work: using images as a substitute for subconscious representations.
Valentine Vermeil, photographer
Catherine Saladin-Grizivatz, psychoanalyst
