Fernand Deligny was born in 1913 in Bergues, in northern France. He was first a teacher of maladjusted children in Paris and Nogent-sur-Marne in 1938, and then an educator in the medical and pedagogical institute at the Armentières asylum during World War II. He founded the first clubs for the prevention of delinquent behaviour in Lille in 1943, and then became the director of the Lille Observation and Triage Centre, which he turned into an open place staffed by workers and Resistance fighters. Together with members of the Communist Party, he founded La Grande Cordée, an association for the ‘free treatment’ care of delinquent and psychotic adolescents in Paris in 1947, which lasted for around 15 years.

From 1967 and following his encounter with Janmari, a nonverbal autistic 10-year-old child, he established an informal network of care for autistic children in the Cévennes, a Protestant-tradition region in southern France. The network lasted until the 1980s. 

‘My project was to write,’ Deligny said: for him, writing was a constant existential activity, a permanent laboratory for his practice as an educator. Between the aphorisms in Graine de crapule (1945), a virulent tract against rehabilitation practices, and L’Enfant de citadelle, an unfinished and unpublished 6,000-page autobiography, of which there are 81 versions, he published no fewer than 20 books. He died in Monoblet in 1996.

The life and work of Deligny are indissociable from his ‘attempts’ to allow delinquent, psychotic and then autistic children and adolescents placed in his care to live according to their ‘ways of being’ rather than to the social rules of education. He carried out these experiments firstly inside institutions and then ‘outside’, where it became possible to wholly and independently devise a specific living environment and common territory. That ‘outside’ perspective was the first condition for Deligny’s attempts; the second was experimentation. He used the term ‘raft’ to refer to this fragmented, cobbled together and precarious territory of the Cévennes network. 

The raft is defined by the places (camps or farms), an organisation, a language and practices that could certainly not be called artistic, since art for Deligny remained a horizon. 

This exhibition, entitled In Praise of  Asylum, is an opportunity to ask questions about that horizon, to stage the experimental forms invested in the Cévennes attempt: Deligny’s writing, inspired by the autistic child Janmari’s endless ‘tracing’; the famous cartography of the children’s ‘wandering lines’ traced by non-professional educators (workers, country folk, students) who lived with the children 24 hours a day; as well as the images – photos, films, paintings – made throughout this quest for ‘the common human’.