On the occasion of Vidéographe’s 50th anniversary, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is devoting a special program to Sylvanie Tendron.

In the spring of 2018, French artist Sylvanie Tendron was the first artist to undertake Vidéographe’s research residency for Deaf artists, curators and researchers.

Since 2004, Tendron has explored behaviors associated with language and communication. Drawing on her own daily experiences, she exposes, with humor and derision, the misunderstandings, obstacles and absurd situations that can arise through encounters of difference.  In her performance videos she tries to overcome almost farcical difficulties that lead to isolation or confinement, in so doing illustrating numerous examples of situations in which we try to connect with others by adapting to their language. Tendron has carried out residencies and presented her work in Bolivia, Morocco, Vietnam, France and Quebec. She lives in Toulouse, France.

During the course of her residency at Vidéographe, the focus of Tendron’s video research and performative actions was the relationship between audism and feminism. She explored this relationship using a deconstructivist approach to phonocentrism as developed by Canadian Deaf artist Jolenta Lapiack, who has drawn on Jacques Derrida’s writings on the deconstruction of logocentrism to establish a causal relationship between phonocentrism and patriarchy. Her videos DrREAD, Hommage à V. DESPENTES and Vampire domestique were realized during the course of this residency.

PROGRAM (36 min)
. Entraves quotidiennes, 2006, 2 min 09s
. Apertura, 2006, 2 min 34s
. Il n’y a pas plus de peuple digne que de culture digne,  2012, 1 min 31 s
. …Répète?!, 2014, 2 min 31s
. Le phonocentrisme vous dites ??, 2017, 3 min 17s
. Vampire domestique, 2018, 8 min 11 s
. DrEAD, 2018, 5 min 53 s
. Hommage à V. Despentes, 2018,  3 min 47s
. Youhouuu, 2019, 3 min 57s
. Est-ce que…??, 2020, 3 min 20 s 

BIOGRAPHY
Since 2004, Sylvanie Tendron has explored behaviors associated with language and communication. Drawing on her own daily experiences, she exposes, with humor and derision, the misunderstandings, obstacles and absurd situations that can arise through encounters of difference. In her performance videos she tries to overcome almost farcical difficulties that lead to isolation or confinement, in so doing illustrating numerous examples of situations in which we try to connect with others by adapting to their language. Tendron has carried out residencies and presented her work in Bolivia, Morocco, Vietnam, France and Quebec. She lives in Toulouse, France.