What I Wish I'd Told You,
Launches at Footscray Community Arts
What I Wish I’d Told You
Launch Date: Saturday 23 July 2022, 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Exhibition Date: 13 July – 28 August 2022
What I Wish I’d Told You, by Claire Bridge and Chelle Destefano with Deaf community, centres Deaf voices, identity, language and culture.
Auslan storytellers affirm Deaf experiences and diverse, complex identities, in an immersive exhibition of large scale video projections, which bring visitors into a Deaf world. In this collaboration of over seventy Deaf and hearing allies, empowered Deaf storytellers draw on decolonising strategies of truth-telling, provocation, and self-representation, to challenge audist colonisation of Deaf lives, bodies, language, and knowledges.
“In Auslan, we pass stories from hand to hand. Our stories cannot be put on a page, detached from us. When we tell stories through sign language, our whole body, mind, emotion, and inner-self is also expressed. Our signed stories carry culture. They are a site of resistance and pride.” – Chelle Destefano
Shared with humour, wit, courage, and care, What I Wish I’d Told You transforms the gallery into a Deaf space and Deaf Cultural experience.
Working together as collaborators and allies, Bridge and Destefano are winners of the West Space/Footscray Community Arts Commission 2022 for ‘What I Wish I’d Told You’.