Avni & Rebecca Dauti are Naarm/Melbourne-based artists whose practice over the past seven years has primarily engaged with film to explore Deaf history. Their work emerges from long-term collaborations with Deaf communities worldwide, and has also taken the form of collaborative research projects, lectures, and film programs, through which they engage with topics such as cultural memory, Deaf studies, language, and practices of translation. Their work has been presented at institutions both nationally and internationally, including the Wellcome Collection in London, the National Museum of Art in Lithuania, Composite Moving Image in Naarm/Melbourne, ACE Gallery in Adelaide, and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and V-A-C in Moscow. They have also presented their work in international film festivals and participated in academic conferences, including Deaf History International and Viittomakielinen filmifestivaali.
Cast and Crew:
Performers:
Joanna Agius
Melissa Anderson
Salomon Gerber
Natalie Sandon-Stanhope
Franco Spadea
Elise Stewart
Tony Tran
Written and Directed by:
Avni Dauti and Rebecca Dauti
Producer:
Olivia Koh
Director of Photography:
Tavis Pinnington:
Gaffer:
Hamish Rayner
Assistant Camera Operators:
Eiman Khairudin
Arandarga Lubis
Production Assistants:
Spring Lee
Anaya Sandon-Gould
Commissioned by MAP Co & recess 2024-2025
A view from the huddle By Dai O'Brien
The arrangement of bodies in Huddle is immediately recognisable to any deaf person, or person who uses signed languages. The circle of bodies, the shared eye gaze, the body being simultaneously open and closed – open to your peers, to your mates, to your conversation partners, and closed to onlookers, to gawkers, to those who want to pry. The solidarity of being shoulder to shoulder with those who get you, who are like you, who share your experience of the world, and the communal breathing space and safety that this solidarity provides.
What appears in Avni Dauti and Rebecca Dauti’s film is more than just a way of standing or a way of communicating. It’s more than just a way of showing your support for your mates. It’s a way of creating a social reality, one which is distinct yet overlapping, equal yet different, to the mundane everyday one which we all inhabit.
It is through our body’s orientation to the world that we create our realities. In The Production of Space (1991), Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, said that social space is a social product which we create through the movement of our bodies. In this film, we see how a specific form of sociality creates a specific form of space through a physical orientation to the world. This social space – this deaf space – is something driven by our sensory interaction with the world, driven by our physical languages and driven by our community values.
Deaf people’s everyday lives are orientated outwards; we live in the hearing world, we engage with hearing people, we live in houses and work in buildings which are designed by and for those who can hear. Our own particular sensory orientation – visual and tactile – is rarely considered or catered for in the design of these environments. Instead, we have to look inwards to ourselves and our communities to create our own spaces, our own little bubbles of accessibility and comfort – often using nothing more than our bodies and the affordances they provide. We do this in various ways; some of which are demonstrated onscreen by the performers in Huddle, some of which are implied in the film without being explicitly discussed.
The first way is how you orientate yourself to others. In any conversation in a visual signed language (between three or more people), participants automatically orientate themselves in triangular or circular formation in order for there to be clear lines of sight between one another; where each person’s signing is clear and accessible to one another. This is contrasted to the way in which hearing people organise themselves when talking, where visual connections are much less important to communication and the conversational space takes a very different shape. For deafblind people, this physical orientation is different again. The originators of Protactile ASL, aj granda, Jelica Nucio and the DeafBlind scholar, poet and author John Lee Clark, have all described the way in which DeafBlind people orientate their bodies towards each other: the importance of touch and of physical closeness is both required and celebrated. This celebration/ attention to touch is at odds with the aloofness and disconnect that the hearing, sighted world seems to demand of any subject.
In the orientation of oneself to others in conversation, there exists a duality of inward/outward orientation: deaf people do not simply ignore what is going on around them and focus exclusively on their own social spaces. There is always overlap, intersection and interpenetration with the spaces around us, not only on the level of conversation, but on a wider social level. There is a moment in Huddle when one of the participants directs their gaze outwards and comments to the others: ‘I feel like someone is looking at us…’ A social value held dear by deaf people is that they look out for one another, they help each other navigate space by collaboratively expanding their field of view. At this moment in the film, the deaf person who notices the outside observer shares that information; extending the huddle’s collective visual reach beyond the field of individual vision. Thus, a collaborative, not individual image of the external world is built. This speaks to the collective nature of deaf communities and belies the conventional impression that the huddle is only exclusive, that it cuts off access to the wider world and is more concerned with keeping others out than bringing the outside world in. Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect and design consultant terms this dorsality: used to describe how deaf people understand and sense the world (beyond the one hundred and eighty degrees that comprises their visual field), instead creating a collective sensory landscape that is understood very differently to that of hearing people.
In the film Huddle, signed conversations proceed through the giving of turns rather than the taking of turns. All too often spoken conversations turn into competitions – who can speak the loudest, who can command the most attention, who can monopolise the conversation through interruptions, through interjections, through domination. Conversations in signed language on the other hand are collaborative, turns are given rather than taken. In Huddle, people attract attention before they talk, they gain the consensus of the others before they begin. They understand that a conversational turn is given and they repay that gift by ensuring that all can see, all can access, before starting to sign.
A final element of the production of signed social space in Huddle is visible in the smaller, secondary screen and discussed explicitly in the performer’s conversation; that of privacy. Despite the common associations with inclusiveness and access, the huddle formation was invented for privacy, to block other people’s view of what is said in a conversation (1). When you are around others who use embodied visual languages like sign, privacy can be difficult to achieve. You can block lines of sight by orienting your body in particular ways to hide your signs, you can use distraction and sleight of hand to obscure your message from onlookers, or you can remove yourself from the space so that conversations can happen in a place you know you won’t be overseen. This is clear in the way in which the film is screened in Federation Square, where the smaller screen shows a secondary camera angle; an outsider’s view of the huddle. In this second angle the camera is hand-held and the viewer can’t see both the inward and outward view at the same time. For people speaking a minoritized language that few people understand, private conversations can happen in plain sight – there’s nothing more subversively fun than discussing someone under their noses when you know they won’t understand what you are saying, and nothing more mortifying when they reveal in fluent sign that, yes, actually, they know exactly what you just said…
These may seem like small observations, but they speak to an alternative social reality, an alternative social space with its own rules, values and existence, alongside the social space produced by non-signing people. Of course, there is diversity within deaf spaces and communities. I’m not trying to argue that they are utopian spaces in which oppression and exclusion does not occur; we struggle with those issues, as do all communities. But we are united by a shared physical experience of how we orient our bodies to the world. Deaf people usually cannot control the built environments they encounter, aside from small things like moving table displays or re-arranging seating plans in restaurants to ensure clear visual reach and lines of sight for one another. Lacking control over our physical environment in this way, how we create our social spaces is down to how we use our bodies. Using a physical language in sign, orienting our bodies in meaningful ways and utilising collaborative visual reach all combine to create a uniquely deaf social space. This is something that Avni Dauti and Rebecca Dauti demonstrate in Huddle through their use of footage shot from within the huddle; you can feel the warmth, closeness, and solidarity of a shared language and cultural space seeping through the screen.
(1) ‘Huddle explores the embodied practice of Deaf huddling, inspired by its origins in sport with Gallaudet University’s Deaf football team in the 1890s, where players used a closed formation to protect their signed communication.’ Artist Text, Avni Dauti and Rebecca Dauti, 2024.
Dai O’Brien is an Associate Professor of British Sign Language and Deaf Studies in York St John University, UK. His research focus is on deaf space – how deaf people create their own social spaces, and how they navigate spaces which are not designed for them.