On Friday 27 September 2024, the Faculty of Architecture and the Higher Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) are organising a symposium around the French pedagogue and writer Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). Six speakers will focus specifically on how space played an important role in his writings and pedagogical practice.
The seminar will take place from 9:30am to 5:30pm in room N of the HIW, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, Leuven (Belgium).
Explication
French educator and writer Fernand Deligny spent the last 30 years of his life in close proximity to highly autistic people. Together with his collaborators, he maintained a network (“réseau”) in the Cévennes countryside that housed those labelled “incurable” or “insufferable” by psychiatric institutions and thus condemned to the institution for life. The team deliberately did not focus on care, diagnostics, therapy or social reintegration. From a critique of ideologies that see the other as an equal, Deligny and the “présences proches” tried to live with the autistic children and adults in the belief that they had nothing in common with them. Nothing except the space, the opening or interstice between them. This in-between space was respected in the “réseau”, at various “aires de séjour” across the (un)hospitable landscape.
Space is a plural, a multiplicity. This seminar focuses on the various ways the team dealt with this space, based on on-site practices and Deligny’s texts. How did language relate to the interstice? What did this in-between space consist of, how did they respond to it and how were they surprised by it? Did the local environment and bodies have an influence? What is the relationship between autism and space? Is there a connection between the space and the shelter the team wanted to provide? To what do concepts like “corps commun”, “chevêtre” and “repères” refer? These are suggestive questions from which this seminar aims to make explicit what space meant to Deligny and the “présences proches” in their lives near autistic and mutistic young people. Moreover, this seminar also wants to ask what happens when this spatial attitude to another – both near and far – is transposed into another time and space, in order to critically examine it. Is there friction between Deligny and some contemporary issues?
Programme
9:30 – 9:45 introduction
9:45 – 10:45 Thibault Desmet
10:50 – 11:20 Johanna Cockx
11:30 – 12:30 Johannes Muselaers
(ENG) “Between Displacement and the Immutable: Tracing in Fernand Deligny’s (1913-1996) Cahiers de l’immuable (1975-1976)”
12:00 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 15:00 prof. Rodolphe Olcèse
(FR) “L’espacement comme forme du refuge selon Deligny”
15:15 – 16:15 arch. Wim Cuyvers
(16:30 – 17:30) prof. em. Jan Masschelein
(FR) “À l’école de Deligny”
organising committee: prof. Stéphane Symons, prof. Filip Mattens & prof. Rajesh Heynickx
contact: thibault.desmet@kuleuven.be