Jacques Lin

The exhibition Fernand Deligny, légendes du radeau is conceived by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Anaïs Masson and Martín Molina Gola, with the help of Gisèle Durand-Ruiz, Jacques Lin and Marina Vidal-Naquet.

Jacques Lin was an electrician at Hispano-Suiza when his friend, industrial designer Roger Panaget, told him Félix Guattari was looking to renovate a large house in the Cévennes. In 1967 at the age of nineteen, he decided to provisionally leave the factory and travel to Monoblet, where he met Fernand Deligny, a few of his companions, and Janmari, the ten-year-old child who was accompanying him. When Deligny decided to create an informal care network for autistic children around Janmari, Jacques Lin joined him and the group. From 1967 to 1974, he organised several open-air camps in which he took care of the “customary” (the everyday life) of the autistic children, with whom he lived day and night as a “close
presence”.

In 1974 he returned to Graniers, the hamlet in which Deligny lived with Gisèle Durand and Janmari. They made bread and continued to draw maps. Jacques Lin took part in shooting the films in progress (Ce gamin, là and Fernand Deligny. À propos d’un film à faire, directed by Renaud Victor) and regularly shot Super 8 films, videos, and animated films. The network, whose “living areas” multiplied, lasted until the 1990s.

When Deligny died in 1996, Janmari, Gilles T. and Christophe B. were still living in Graniers. The department of Le Gard required that their care be made official. Jacques Lin and Gisèle Durand became the heads of a site designated as an “untraditional and experimental care organisation”. With the help of a few educators, they accommodated up to six autistic adults on a large renovated silkworm farm just a few hundred metres from Graniers. In 1996, Jacques Lin published La Vie de radeau, and in 2020 he made the film Aucun d’eux ne dit mot, produced by Richard Copans and Les Films d’ici.