and/or: text performativity in Ameslan (ASL)
This 40-minutes performative presentation took place at the Inspired: Art of ASL Festival at Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin, USA. on September 27, 2008.
Statement by Jolanta Lapiak
This postmodern presentation blends a weave of the performance, work of art, calligraphy, prose, and poetry all in Ameslan or ASL.
This one-of-a-kind presentation challenges conventional thinking about the literary components by undermining the traditional dichotomy and by playing complementarity and ambiguity of the following: presentation and performance, writing and speaking (manually), language and gesture, poetry and prose, looking and reading, literality and metaphor. This work is a Derridean deconstruction of the concepts and meanings of language and literature.
This poetic presentation celebrates a rich potential of how visual-manual language can transform literary components into other dimensional forms, for example, by metamorphosing calligraphy into verbal calligraphy. It enhances the beauty and richness of Ameslan.
