With the wander lines, the point was to avoid misunderstandings and to enter the children's field of vision in a way that enabled a communal life outside of language. These drawings were assembled by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo in Maps and Wander Lines, Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny, 1969—1979 published by Editions L’Arachnéen in 2013.

Sandra Alvarez de Toledo is the editor and founder of L’Arachnéen Publishing, a project initiated in 2007 with the publication of an important volume—1850 pages of «almost complete works» by Fernand Deligny—and, the following year, with the edition of a second compilation entitled L’Arachnéen et autres textes [The Arachnean and Others Texts], comprising of an essay which lends its name to the publishing house, and a variety of texts about the notion of network. At the origin of this rediscovery and the spread of Fernand Deligny's work and the network of the Cévennes, Alvarez will discuss the publication of maps and wander lines gathering the drawings and their descriptions written from interviews with their authors.

“It was essential to publish those maps for what they are: not some aesthetic objects but rather documents of “presence”, the trace of an experience during which children qualified as deficient and adults qualified as normal shared a communal life. These are not “drawings”, in the sense that they reveal neither artistic intention nor any project of “representing”. Deligny spoke about tracing, in the infinitive, to focus on the tension of the gesture that is being made and on the asubjective and primordial nature of this gesture. To us, those long captions were essential: we needed to describe—and not explain: those maps do not interpret anything on a psychological plan—and specify what those wander lines correspond to, these numerous signs invented to point out a meeting point, the exact and repeated spot where the gesture of an adult provoked the gesture of a child. We needed to distinguish a wander line, a route “for nothing”, from a route motivated by the everyday repetition of tasks, in order to specify that this child would detect on this particular day a task and on a different one a close presence, and that another child couldn’t locate anything in space.”

—Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, interview by Gwilherm Perthuis, Journal Hippocampe n°12, November 2013.

 

This lecture is organised with the generous support of Les Amis du CRAC Alsace.