The result of an unprecedented joint venture between the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, this exhibition brings together for the first time some highly diverse figures: artists historically linked to Art Brut, some of whose writing activities have taken place in nursing homes and psychiatric facilities, and contemporary artists. What unites such different personalities is the desire to capture in writing an elsewhere, to go beyond language’s semantic dimension and freely explore its innovative and fantastical potential.

All the works on show inhabit a particular territory, where the written gesture reflects more the "intention to say" than the actual "saying" itself, and more the force of meaning than the act of the signified, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben. Frenzied writing, sometimes, transcending meaning, that becomes an existential trace and self-assertion, but also a fantastic element, a metaphor of the world and its mysteries. This research addresses this ancestral human tension of wanting to surpass the communicative dimension of writing, moving towards the free and absolute re-appropriation of the graphic sign, of its creative and imaginative heritage.